70% of UK workers are in occupations containing tasks AI could potentially perform or enhance, according to IMF estimates cited in the UK government’s own January 2026 assessment of AI’s labour market impact, a higher share than the US or most other advanced economies. But exposure isn’t the same as disappearance: within that 70%, roughly half sit in roles where AI is more likely to boost productivity than replace the work entirely.
This piece works through what the evidence actually shows, not the confident prediction in either direction that usually gets attention, but the government’s own more careful picture: which tasks are genuinely exposed, which skills are rising in measurable demand, which roles are already showing real effects, and where new roles are emerging rather than just disappearing.
Explore: AI and the Future of Work: What’s Actually Happening to UK Jobs, for the broader picture this piece sits within.
It’s Tasks, Not Whole Jobs, That Are Changing
The 70% figure sounds alarming until it’s broken down properly. DSIT’s assessment splits that exposure in two: 35% of UK workers are in roles with high exposure and high complementarity, meaning AI is more likely to boost their productivity than replace their work. 32% sit in high exposure, low complementarity roles, where AI is more likely to actually perform tasks currently done by a person. The remaining 33% have low exposure either way.
The government’s own framing is worth quoting directly: “exposed to AI” does not mean “about to disappear.” It means a job contains tasks AI can affect, which is a very different, and much more common, situation than a job becoming obsolete.
Academic research using a UK-specific exposure index backs this up with sharper detail. By 2023/24, 94% of UK jobs showed some level of exposure to generative AI, but only 13% were highly exposed, concentrated specifically in scientific and technical professions. That’s a genuine departure from earlier waves of automation, which mostly targeted routine manual and clerical work rather than knowledge work.
Which Skills Are Actually Rising in Demand
Globally, the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 names AI and big data as the single fastest-growing skill category, followed closely by networks and cybersecurity, then technological literacy. Despite the AI focus, the single most sought-after skill overall hasn’t changed: analytical thinking, which seven in ten employers still consider essential.
LinkedIn’s own 2026 UK-specific data, measuring genuine year-on-year growth in both skill acquisition and hiring success, groups the UK’s fastest-growing skills into five real clusters:
- AI, machine learning and generative technologies: prompt engineering, chatbot development, large language models
- Data strategy and workflow optimisation: data-driven decision making, data storytelling, process automation
- Operations and risk resilience: governance, risk management, cyber risk, ethical decision-making
- Leadership, culture and communication: cross-functional collaboration, project management
- Commercial intelligence and delivery: strategic planning, technology roadmapping
The pattern is consistent across both the global and UK-specific data: AI capability is spreading well beyond technical teams into commercial and operational leadership. The skills rising fastest aren’t just about using AI tools directly, they’re increasingly about governing, interpreting, and applying what those tools produce.
Which Roles Are Genuinely Most Exposed
The clearest UK-specific evidence comes from hiring data itself:
- DSIT’s analysis of UK job postings found a one standard deviation increase in AI exposure was associated with a 3.9% reduction in posting volume, an effect that became statistically significant around seven months after ChatGPT’s release
- McKinsey’s separate analysis, cited in the same government report, found UK job adverts fell 38% for high-exposure occupations between 2022 and 2025, compared with 21% for low-exposure roles
Junior and graduate roles show a sharper pattern still:
- Skills England’s 2026 report cites King’s College London research finding AI-exposed firms reduced total employment by 4.5%, and junior positions specifically by 5.8%
- Adzuna’s data found graduate job adverts were 45% lower in 2025 than the year before, with entry-level adverts down 25%
It’s worth being as careful with this evidence as the government itself is. DSIT’s own report is explicit that these patterns are suggestive, not proof of causation. Exposure isn’t the same as adoption, and AI exposure correlates with other factors, like interest-rate sensitivity, that could explain some of the same decline. The report even offers a useful check on overcorrecting: hospitality, a sector with relatively low AI exposure, still accounted for 53% of UK job losses between October 2024 and August 2025, for entirely unrelated reasons.
Geography adds another layer. The Greater London Authority’s 2026 analysis found 46% of London workers, around 2.4 million people, are in roles where generative AI could automate part of their tasks, compared with a 38% UK average.
Where This Creates Genuine New Roles, Not Just Losses
The displacement data above is only half the picture, and treating it as the whole story would be as misleading as ignoring it. WEF’s global projection estimates 170 million jobs created against 92 million displaced by 2030, a net gain of 78 million globally.
There’s real UK-specific evidence that these new, AI-adjacent roles are already being rewarded, not just theorised about. Gov.uk’s own analysis found roles it categorises as AI Experts command a 42% salary premium, AI Specialists 25%, and AI Implementers 14%, all compared with equivalent roles that don’t require AI skills. That’s a genuine, measurable market signal, not a prediction.
It’s worth being honest about the limits of this evidence too, in the same spirit as the section above. DSIT’s own report explicitly names “measuring the rate and nature of new job creation” as one of the biggest remaining evidence gaps in this whole area. We can measure job losses in exposed roles reasonably well, largely because job postings are trackable. New role creation is genuinely harder to measure at the same resolution, which means the true scale of the offsetting job creation is probably underrepresented in the data we currently have, not overstated.
What This Means for Career and Workforce Planning
None of this data points to a single, clean action. It points to a specific kind of attention:
- For individuals, the practical takeaway isn’t “learn to code” or “avoid AI-exposed roles” as blanket advice, exposure doesn’t map cleanly onto risk in the way that’s often assumed. It’s closer to knowing which specific tasks within your own role fall into low-complementarity territory, and building skill in the areas rising fastest around it.
- For HR and L&D teams specifically, this data is the actual raw material for workforce planning, not background reading. The junior-role pattern deserves particular attention: if AI-exposed firms are genuinely cutting entry-level hiring at a faster rate than experienced roles, that’s a pipeline problem HR is best placed to see coming and plan for, since today’s graduates are tomorrow’s experienced hires, and a hiring gap now compounds later.
The honest throughline across all the evidence here is that certainty is in short supply, even the government’s own assessment says as much. What isn’t in short supply is direction: exposure is real, new demand is real, and the HR and L&D functions paying attention to both, rather than just the more dramatic half of the story, are the ones best positioned to plan around it.
How Avado Can Help
Building the skills this piece points to, data literacy, governance, analytical thinking, and the judgement to apply AI well rather than just use it, is exactly what a genuine HR and L&D qualification is built for, whatever stage of the career ladder someone is on. Avado’s CIPD qualifications, from Level 3 through Level 7, are built around exactly this kind of skills development, backed by free 1:1 career mentorship and Avado’s CPD-accredited Career Accelerator programme to help put it into practice.
Explore Avado’s CIPD courses and build the skills that are actually rising in demand, wherever you’re starting from!
