Microsoft Study Says These Jobs Are Not Likely To Be Replaced By AI

A new study by Microsoft Research (MSR) has analyzed 200,000 conversations between users from various walks of life and Microsoft Bing Copilot, which revealed some interesting findings. This study claims that some occupations are unlikely to be impacted much by generative AI.

The researchers devised a way to assign an "AI applicability score" to each user's occupation. The results are not terribly surprising. As you would expect, jobs with the lowest AI applicability scores involved physical duties, while jobs with non-physical duties, such as information gathering, recorded the highest scores.

Roles like Massage therapists, Tractor operators, Water treatment plant and system operators, and Housekeepers, are among the least impacted by generative AI. The table below shows the 40 least impacted occupations by generative AI, which are those with the lowest AI applicability scores.


Microsoft indicates that users behind the conversations analyzed in this study were anonymized, and the AI applicability scores assigned to each occupation were based on a combination of several factors, including the AI model's success rate, the user's goal, and the task success rate.

It is worth noting that Microsoft says, "It is tempting to conclude that occupations that have high overlap with activities AI performs will be automated and thus experience job or wage loss, and that occupations with activities AI assists with will be augmented and raise wages. This would be a mistake, as our data do not include the downstream business impacts of new technology, which are very hard to predict and often counterintuitive."