AI will augment high-skilled jobs but hit clerical work hardest, Australia's government predicts
Generative AI is set to automate large chunks of routine clerical and administrative work while serving as a powerful assistant for high-skilled roles, according to new modelling from Jobs and Skills Australia.
The government agency's "Our Gen AI transition" report, released on Thursday, used economy-wide Computable General Equilibrium modelling — a type of economic simulation that tracks how changes ripple across all industries and occupations — to forecast how automation and augmentation could reshape Australia's labor market between now and 2050.
The model incorporated "exposure" scores for 998 occupations, estimating how much of each job could be fully automated or partially augmented by AI technology.
The results showed that only about 4% of the workforce is in occupations with high automation exposure, while 79% have low automation exposure but medium-to-high augmentation potential.
That means AI is more likely to change how most jobs are done rather than eliminate them.
JSA's report listed routine clerical roles, including general clerks, receptionists, accounting clerks, and bookkeepers, as the most automatable.
At the other end of the spectrum, knowledge-intensive jobs like managers, engineers, healthcare professionals, and educators had higher augmentation potential.
JSA's modelling projected the biggest job declines by 2050 for general clerks, receptionists, accounting clerks and bookkeepers, sales and marketing professionals, and programmers.
It predicted the largest job gains for cleaners and laundry workers, nurses and midwives, business administration managers, construction and mining laborers, and hospitality workers — occupations that require physical presence and human touch.
While the pace of change will vary depending on how quickly industries and occupations adopt generative AI, JSA forecasts slower employment growth through the 2030s as the labor market adjusts, followed by faster growth in the 2040s.
"The quality of adoption and implementation will be instrumental in achieving the benefits of labor-augmenting tools," the report said.
The report also found no evidence of a broad decline in entry-level hiring so far, but said early signs suggest these jobs may evolve, shifting from performing repetitive tasks to overseeing and refining AI-generated outputs.
JSA urged policymakers to prepare now with targeted training, industry partnerships, and digital inclusion efforts to ensure all workers can benefit from the AI transition, especially women, older Australians, First Nations peoples, and people with disabilities, who the report found are more likely to be in roles with higher automation risk.
The findings come amid a wider debate over how AI will affect human work.
Satya Nadella, the Microsoft CEO, has argued that while " knowledge work" will be redefined as AI takes on tasks once done exclusively by people, humans will still be needed to oversee and direct the technology.
Others are more pessimistic. Adam Dorr, the research director at the think tank RethinkX, has warned that AI could make most human jobs obsolete by 2045, leaving only a narrow set of roles that depend on human connection or ethical complexity.
Geoffrey Hinton, dubbed the "Godfather of AI," has meanwhile said " mundane intellectual labor" is most at risk, predicting that one person could end up doing the work of 10 with AI assistance.
In the eyes of the Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, AI will automate certain roles but create new jobs in areas such as robotics, while Bill Gates has highlighted the potential for AI to solve chronic shortages of teachers and doctors.
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