Investigating employees’ occupational risks and benefits resulting from artificial intelligence: An empirical analysis

Abstract

With rapid advances in artificial intelligence (AI), more employees are benefiting from or being replaced by AI. Nevertheless, we know little about the extent to which AI affects employees’ occupations positively. This study improves the methodologies for quantifying employees’ occupational AI benefits and risks. We propose three mechanisms by which AI may benefit employees’ careers: productivity-enhanced AI jobs, intelligence-augmented AI jobs, and AI-enabling jobs. We also conduct employee-level analyses regarding how employees’ skills, educational backgrounds, and demographics may correlate with occupational risk and AI benefits. Our results suggest that these key factors have distinct effects on different AI benefits.