But these kinds of projections aren't unusual at all — if you use the Deep Research capabilities of modern models to build a list of public projections for your own research, you'll see similar estimates. These reports will generally use the framing of "efficiency gains", where AI will "free-up employees from drudgery to focus on higher-value work", but my intuition is that a future where all individual contributors are elevated to Director of Agentic Workflows is probably not the most likely outcome.
The model by MIT's Daron Acemoglu estimates that ~5% of U.S. tasks can be completely and profitably automated by AI within ten years.
It was expressly not a head-count forecast, and didn't attempt to quantify the headcount reduction that AI augmentation could enable.
I understand all the theory but it can largely be condensed into - AI makes workforce more efficient so you need less people. But there are no good studies afaik that measure AI powered efficiency and surely nothing about how to model workforce reduction due to AI. I am curious what the science is behind these opinions.
Okay, but what are these reports _based_ on? Everything I've seen along these lines has been, essentially, marketing material; there seems to be very little hard data suggesting this kind of outcome.
