The World Economic Forum’s 2025 Future of Jobs Report found that as many as 41% of employers were planning on downsizing their workforce due to AI. That number is even higher in the United States, where 48% of respondents said they were planning on adopting the strategy.
But while that statistic may be concerning, it does not necessarily mean that there is an impending employment crisis, according to Till Leopold, a lead author of the study and the Head of Work, Wages, and Job Creation at the World Economic Forum.
“We’re not looking at this famous ‘jobs apocalypse’ scenario,” Leopold tells CNBC Make It.
Rather, Leopold thinks that it’s an issue of upskilling. The Future of Jobs Report found that 77% of employers are looking at upskilling their current workforce to better work alongside AI, while 47% are looking at transitioning employees from declining roles into other roles in the organization.
“The key takeaway is not that we might not have enough jobs,” Leopold tells CNBC Make It. “The issue is really that jobs may look much different.”
Leopold says that the jobs most likely to be affected are largely white-collar jobs that focus heavily on data entry, like clerical and paralegal work, which he says is largely in line with what has been found in previous editions of the report. Newer additions include accounting and graphic design jobs, as newer generative AI models have improved capabilities for both.
 “Will accounting jobs, graphic design as they exist today still be around in five years? I think what we’re being told is very clearly, ‘No,'” Leopold tells CNBC Make It. “A new sort of job that is basically an evolved version [will].”
Other recent reports corroborate the World Economic Forum’s findings.
A June 2024 survey of chief financial officers conducted by Duke University and the Federal Reserves of Atlanta and Richmond found that 37% of respondents had used artificial intelligence to complete tasks previously done by employees. 54% were planning on doing so over the next year, including 76% of large firms.
Yet, like Leopold, John Graham, a finance professor at Duke and the academic director of the survey, remained confident that there would not be large amounts of job loss.
“In the short run, this will be more about plugging some holes and possibly not hiring someone they would have otherwise – but not laying someone off,” he told CNN at the time.
A different study by Bloomberg Intelligence paints a less rosy picture, particularly of Wall Street. It said that banks could cut up to 200,000 jobs in the next five years due to artificial intelligence. Nearly a quarter of respondents indicated a steep decline — between 5% and 10% of their workforce.
But despite the findings of the study, author Tomasz Noetzel agreed with Leopold and Graham. “Any jobs involving routine, repetitive tasks are at risk. But AI will not eliminate them fully, rather it will lead to workplace transformation,” he said.
As for the future, Leopold suggests that soft skills will play a major role.
“We need these what we call ‘human skills’ [such as] creativity, collaboration, resilience, agility,” Leopold tells CNBC Make It. “These … become newly important.”
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