Revisiting the occupational impact of AI in the generative AI era
JRC Working Papers Series on Labour, Education and Technology 2026/02
Generative AI is reshaping what artificial intelligence can do in the workplace, calling into question pre-GenAI assessments of which workers and tasks are most exposed. In this paper we trace the evolution of AI exposure in the European labour market from 2008 to 2024 by linking 352 AI benchmarks to 14 cognitive abilities, 108 work tasks and 127 ISCO-3 occupations, weighting benchmarks by their research intensity in the AI literature and thus deriving AI exposure by cognitive ability. Bundling work tasks into occupations based on intensity indicators, we explore occupational exposure to AI. We find that the cognitive abilities most exposed to the recent surge of AI research are ideas-related, such as attention and search, comprehension and expression and logical reasoning. Because the associated information processing and problem-solving tasks are the most transversal across occupations, we find an exponential increase in AI exposure across all occupational categories of workers, even though comparatively high-skilled occupations are more exposed than elementary occupations. This points at a substantial and transversal labour market impact of AI.
CASAS Pablo;
FERNANDEZ MACIAS Enrique;
MARTINEZ PLUMED Fernando;
GOMEZ Emilia;
GONZALEZ VAZQUEZ Ignacio;
SALOTTI Simone;
2026-03-13
European Commission
JRC145832
https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC145832,
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