AI and the UK labour market: the evidence so far

Despite widespread concerns about the negative impact of AI on employment, we find no evidence that it has replaced jobs at scale in the UK. By analysing occupational exposure and employment data across 412 occupations, we see that employment in highly exposed roles has actually grown rather than contracted since the deployment of large language models like ChatGPT.

While AI adoption is moving quickly, it remains concentrated in a narrow band of tasks—roughly a fifth of all tasks account for the vast majority of usage. Rather than automating entire jobs, AI is largely being used to augment human labour, resulting in a modest increase in the number of hours worked in exposed occupations. While this doesn't rule out larger disruptive effects in the future, the current data points to adaptation rather than mass displacement.