AI is now part of nearly half of all jobs
A new study from Anthropic finds that AI is helping people do their jobs better, not taking them away.
Now, reported as 44-49% of jobs use AI for at least a quarter of their tasks, up from 36% in the previous Anthropic report.
So, more people are teaming up with AI at work than ever before.
Researchers used 'economic primitives' to track AI's impact on work
Researchers used something called "economic primitives" (think: ways to track how tough or independent a task is) to really see how AI changes different kinds of work.
This gave them a clearer picture of where AI helps most.
AI boosts higher-skilled workers most
AI gives the biggest boost to higher-skilled workers:
On Anthropic's Claude.ai sample, college-level tasks were sped up 12 times, while high school-level ones sped up nine times.
Basically, if your job's more complex, you're likely seeing bigger gains; repetitive tasks such as data entry show high AI coverage and are identified as among occupations exposed to automation risk.
In a scenario of widespread adoption, US labor productivity could rise
Under a scenario of widespread adoption Anthropic estimated US labor productivity could rise by about 1.8% points per year; after adjusting for task reliability their adjusted estimates fall to roughly 1.2% points (consumer usage) or about 1.0% point (API/business usage).
But since humans still need to double-check what AIs do (especially on tricky stuff), progress will be steady, not instant.