# How will AI impact the jobs market? \| BBC News - Channel: [BBC News](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC16niRr50-MSBwiO3YDb3RA) - Published: 2026-05-29 - Source video: [Watch on YouTube](https://youtube.com/watch?v=fpHOCyFesxI) - Read on ReadTube: https://www.read.tube/p/videos/fpHOCyFesxI - Language: Original (source language) ## Article ### Worries About Widespread Unemployment Research suggests that seven in 10 workers are worried about their jobs and think AI will lead to widespread unemployment. Are they right to be worried? **Mo:** No. **Interviewer:** Are they right to be worried? **Mo:** Absolutely. Are we going to start on that low? Yes. I have to believe that we are going to see unemployment rising in the next two to three years. Some sectors will see 20–30% unemployment. Unheard-of numbers, really. But that’s not a challenge of AI. That’s a challenge of a choice of the capitalists who run businesses, who will choose to reduce cost by asking people to leave rather than increase the overall intelligence of an organization by empowering people with AI and technology to make people do more. **Interviewer:** But is it not unrealistic to expect companies not to use AI to save money and improve the bottom line at the end of the day? **Mo:** The idea of saving money in itself is actually a very complex idea. At an individual level, every organization wants to save money, but if every organization in the UK or anywhere in the world would save money by laying people off, you’re wiping out the consumption side of GDP. When you do that, what ends up happening is that people will not have the purchasing power to even buy what you’re making. **Interviewer:** Because they won’t have the income. **Mo:** Because they won’t have the income. In a very interesting way, at a very individualistic level, a company may benefit from laying off people, but for the economy at large, it’s actually quite risky for the economy. ### Will AI Displace Jobs or Create New Work? **Interviewer:** Victor, tell us about you, then, because you have a company that—you basically employ actors to let you use their face and their voice, I imagine, to create training videos and that kind of thing. They give their consent, but obviously that then means they don’t have a job with you after that. They’ve just got that one job. Are you as worried as Mo? **Victor:** I think we’ll definitely see displacement of jobs. **Interviewer:** Does that mean losses? **Victor:** I think it depends on the timeline that we’re talking about. If we look at a three-, five-, or ten-year timeline, I think we will find things to do. I think work will change. I don’t subscribe to the idea that businesses will just save costs. On the contrary, what we’re seeing right now is that businesses will develop more products. Humans will change what they do. A lot of the busy work that we do today, we can probably replace with AI. But I tend to think that great companies today consist of great people. In five or ten years, great companies will still consist of great people. If you go back 50 years in time and told everyone that most people’s job would be sitting at a desk and looking into a screen, no one would believe you, right? We’ve gone through this progression many times in history before. There will for sure be displacement and disruption, I think, but I’m very optimistic that humans will find ways to play status games. We will do much more than we could before, and I think there’ll be a lot of new jobs in the future. I actually think that when you look at what is most valuable in society, it is generally what is the most scarce. What’s about to happen right now is that what has been very scarce—software development, numerical jobs, analytical jobs—will be much easier to do with technology. I think the value of human relations and human connection is going to go up very, very significantly. For a consumer to talk to a human, or a business to talk to a human, I think that’ll be much more valuable in a year or two. **Interviewer:** We end up talking to chatbots a lot, don’t we? **Victor:** We’ll get more of that, but I think the value of the human in the loop will increase. It won’t be responding to whether your package is on the way. It will be something that’s more valuable, more creative than that. ### Uncertainty About the Future of Work **Interviewer:** We have a few hands up already. Let’s hear the man in the white T-shirt in the middle. **Audience member:** I’m hedging my bets personally, purely because people like Sam Altman came out recently, in the past few days, and made predictions that he previously made around job losses and things. He’s kind of rolling back on them. It feels as though we’re clearly going through a massive period of change and there’s lots of uncertainty, but it feels as though the ink isn’t dry yet. There are still decisions to be made on where the future goes and whether there are as big job losses as people say. **Interviewer:** When you come along to be part of our audience, we talk to you at some length about your experiences, as well as your politics and everything else. There are a few people I particularly wanted to talk to. Richard Gagan, you’re here at the front. We’re talking about job losses. There’s also been a report out today about young people not in education, employment, or training, and quite how bad the job market is. What’s your experience? **Richard Gagan:** I just graduated two weeks ago with a degree in computer science, and I’ve been specifically applying for software engineering roles. So far, I’d say I’ve applied to over 150 positions. **Interviewer:** 150? **Richard Gagan:** Yes. I’ve got friends, and I know people online applying for hundreds of positions globally. These companies are using AI to replace software engineering entry-level roles. It means that it’s really hard and really competitive to get these roles out of university. I feel like this is just going to keep going forward as these AI companies develop better and better tools. **Interviewer:** How does that make you feel about your future job prospects? **Richard Gagan:** Obviously, I started back in 2022. I had no idea that this AI bubble would boom. Software engineering was probably the primary career path people would take coming out of a computer science degree. Now it feels like that career is not safe at all. In 20 years’ time, I feel like even in 10 years’ time, it might not even exist at all. Now I’ve got to find something else. ### How Worried Should Young Workers Be? **Interviewer:** Laura, how right are people to be worried about job losses? **Laura:** I think it’s a very reasonable thing to worry about. We have seen—the gentleman in the white shirt made a really good point—that there’s a very big difference between predicting the future, which we’ve got lots of data and evidence showing that humans are really bad at, and in fact that experts are worse than people who know nothing about it. **Interviewer:** I always have to be careful what you ask people. Future prediction is very tricky. What about the question our audience is asking? Research suggests that seven in 10 workers are worried about their jobs. Are they right to be worried? **Laura:** They are. Without predicting the future, we have seen a genuine collapse in the job market for younger people. That isn’t necessarily borne out for people further on in their careers. I think there’s been a 16% decline in entry-level jobs since ChatGPT came out, though not all of it is necessarily because of that. I think I saw 28% of graduate jobs in the past year or so. You’re looking at something that is currently a real problem. Then we have all these lovely predictions that say that by 2030 there’ll be 170 million new jobs and the loss of 92 million old jobs, and that people need to transition. So you’ve got two problems. First, is that right, and will all of these new jobs be created? Secondly, do you keep the education system up, and do you have a place for the people who are caught at that transition point, which is happening right now? I don’t know the answer, but I think yes, it’s a very reasonable thing to worry about. ### Lessons From Earlier Technologies **Audience member:** On the new technology coming in, there are a couple of examples I’ve come across. The first was when spreadsheets came out. Initially, I think the suspicion was that accountants would go out of work. In fact, instead of summing things, they were able to add a great deal more value, and there are more accountants. If you look at agriculture, years ago the whole base of the US used to be involved in the fields, whereas now only 3% are. But there’s far more productivity, which allows people to go and do different things. Ultimately, if we can use technology and develop ourselves, we’ll be better for it. **Interviewer:** A woman there in the blue top. **Audience member:** I agree with what the panel has said so far about jobs, and I’m aware that there will be some jobs that AI may take. I’m concerned about the routine jobs that AI will likely replace. Those are what help us build the experience to be competent in entry-level jobs. I use AI in my job, but I’m able to critique it because I have the knowledge and skills in the area that I’m trying to use it for. If we fast-forward 10 years and a cohort of students have just got used to producing things with AI without the competence to be able to critique it, challenge it, or anything like that, they’re not going to be able to use it properly. ### Experimenting With AI Inside Companies **Interviewer:** We’ve got someone in the audience, Charles, who’s at the front here and has direct experience. You run your own company, I believe, and you’ve been using AI to be able to reduce the workforce. Tell us a bit about that. **Charles:** We haven’t reduced a lot because, at this stage, we’re experimenting with vast amounts of AI. We see the technology capable of doing so much that we can’t fathom how far we can go with it. We’re in a phase of experimentation. I would say over 90% of what we try doesn’t really work yet. We can imagine that in a few years it might. Some things can be immediately applied, and they might reduce jobs. That has happened with us, and it will continue to happen to everybody in the industry because it’s such an obvious use case, but very few things do that today. What we can’t understand very well is how many new opportunities it will create. We know there will be new opportunities, but it’s hard for us to see them yet. We’re in an experimentation phase. It’s actually adding costs for us today rather than reducing costs. There’s a little bit of reduction and a lot of experimentation, which is expensive. The expectation is that in the next two or three years, those experiments will yield new services or new opportunities. How we exploit those is still nebulous, but the point was made earlier: we are very bad at predicting, but we’re very good at experimenting. That’s the phase we’re in now. ### The Immediate Job Losses and the Tax Challenge **Interviewer:** Darren, one thing that struck me about what Mo had to say is that, while it’s clear we don’t know exactly what’s coming, there are jobs being laid off. Standard Chartered is down 8,000 people. BT predicts 55,000 fewer employees by the end of the decade. Amazon has already got rid of 14,000, and it’s got something like 16,000 more to come. Whether that’s all AI or not is not apparent, but certainly AI is being laid at the door of some, if not all, of those job losses. One thing that Mo mentioned was that if people aren’t working, who’s going to be paying the taxes and paying for all the services that we use? Is this something you’re even thinking about? **Darren:** It is, and it’s deeply personal and political, as well as an interest for government. As a Labour Party politician, our mission of sharing power, wealth, and opportunity amongst the many and not the few is, I would argue, more relevant today than it was when my party was created to represent the interests of workers at the start of the 20th century. The reason I say that is because the UK economy is around 80% services. Service industry jobs are the ones that are most at risk from the large language models and frontier AI tools that are being developed. The challenge for us as political leaders, and the challenge for all of us as a country that relies on creating our wealth from the service industry, is how we shape this technology in the interests of the British economy and the British people, as opposed to just allowing the market to rip through, take away jobs, and extract wealth from the UK and send it predominantly to US big tech companies. **Interviewer:** What are you coming up with? There are so many unknowns in this topic, but this is happening at an exponential rate. You need to be thinking fast; you need to be thinking now. Do you have any solutions? **Darren:** The government is working on a whole range of issues. One of them is training and skills support. Are we giving young people the skills, degrees, and technical training that are best suited to the modern economy as they come out of the education system? Or do we need to work with those providers to make sure that people are not having to go back and think a second time about what they might want to be? **Interviewer:** What about this bigger point? If there are fewer people in work, fewer taxes will be paid, and you’ll have less of an income as a nation. What are you going to do about that if it comes to pass? **Darren:** That can’t come to pass because the math just doesn’t add up for us as a country. We’re already an aging population, with fewer people paying tax in work and higher demand on public services. We’ve got to do two things. We’ve got to make sure we create wealth in the UK that is reinvested back into the UK. On public services, we’ve also got to use things like AI to make sure that we can provide better services more efficiently, at a lower cost, to achieve better outcomes for people who want to use them more. **Interviewer:** Those are all things that you want to do, but I haven’t heard how you’re going to do it. **Darren:** We’re doing a number of these things already. On public services, for example, we are creating the technology so that you can log in and prove who you are through the `gov.uk` app, so that we can help you get access to services more efficiently than being on the phone or waiting for a letter to come through the post. The big message here is that this can be a huge threat to the UK economy, and it’s right that people worry about that. But it can also be an enormous opportunity for Britain. We’ve seized the benefits of industrial revolutions in the past. We have huge strengths and assets here in the UK to be able to seize them again. But you need political leaders and business leaders working in partnership with us. We need each and every worker in this country, and each young person in this country, to be given the skills to step up into this national endeavor. ### The Cost of Employing Humans and the Need for Talent Pipelines **Interviewer:** Julia. **Julia:** I completely understand why people would be worried, but as we’ve heard from the panel, there’s a real range of quite differing scenarios about how this plays out. The early evidence is actually quite mixed. The gentleman in the audience talked about how he’s applying AI, but it’s not actually very clear yet how it’s going to make a difference to his business. A lot of companies that have been encouraged to use AI to transform their internal systems are finding that it’s not giving them the productivity gains they had anticipated. Now that the cost of tokens is going up, the relative cost versus humans is actually a slightly different calculation. One of the obvious own goals from the government on this is that it has made the employment of humans more expensive and added a lot of regulation and complexity to that. That has made it very difficult, particularly when it comes to young people. People do not want to take the risk of employing a young person, and I think this is going to prove to be a real mistake—not just from the government, but from companies themselves—by not building that talent pipeline. **Interviewer:** But, Julia, in fairness, we’ve talked a lot on this program over many weeks and months about the arguments going backwards and forwards about whether the government increasing employers’ National Insurance is a good or a bad thing. Looking at the big picture for a minute, in one sense there is a juggernaut coming our way, which is AI. It could eradicate a lot of jobs, or it might possibly create new ones—we don’t know. So what’s happening now in terms of employers’ National Insurance—is that not just tinkering around the edges in terms of the difference that is made? **Julia:** I don’t think so. If you view it collectively, Fiona, if you’re the government, you’ve got to give businesses the tools to win the race. Labour is increasing the cost of employing people. It’s increasing the cost of energy, so that these tech companies can’t base themselves here. It’s creating regulatory uncertainty. It’s doing a very bad job at applying AI within government, so the cost of government is increasing. There have been 8,000 more civil servants under Labour than previously. They’ve undone a lot of the great AI tools that Laura was building when she was in government. **Interviewer:** Lots of people are going to lose their jobs. If so, what would you do? **Julia:** Any responsible politician has to be worried about that scenario. **Interviewer:** What would you suggest doing about it? **Julia:** I would give companies the tools to win, to make sure that they are growing as companies and are able to base themselves in this country, rather than looking at other countries and other jurisdictions. You can’t wish away this technology, but you can try to build a really strong ecosystem in this country. On those basic fundamentals, I think Labour is getting a lot of things wrong. ### Augmented Intelligence and the Risk of Outsourcing AI **Interviewer:** You wanted to come in there. **Victor:** I think that’s spot on, to be honest. The only answer you have is to keep growing the economy in ways where more people will have jobs. To answer the gentleman in the white T-shirt, there is a very big difference between the technology of the past, which was a tool, and AI. We were building tools that people could use. If you’re a taxi driver and we give you a navigation system, you may be able to do your job a little better. An AI that replaces that altogether—a self-driving car—will not even need the driver in the first place. Having said that, we live in the era of augmented intelligence. We haven’t yet gone to an era where AI can replace everything, but it can make every single person smarter. The biggest challenge, if we talk about the UK economy—and I have no right to comment on that—is that you’re outsourcing AI to other economies instead of building things within your economy that can create more jobs. You’re basically giving it all away across the Atlantic, to the other side. That’s a massive, massive risk. ### The Need for Political Cooperation **Interviewer:** The end goal? I’m going to move on. Did you— **Darren:** Can I come back very quickly on one of Julia’s points? I would just say that making it easier to sack people and not protect workers in this environment is the complete opposite of what we should be doing. I’m very happy to defend our employment rights legislation. But I’d also say that politically, there was a whole list of things there we can agree and disagree on. Political parties actually need to come together on this issue because it is a big issue facing our country. Britain will either rise or fall if we get this right or wrong. We need to get beyond the traditional political bickering and come together with a strategy that can be advanced. **Interviewer:** It’s an important critique to make, Darren, and it’s one that Tony Blair made of your government this week. It’s important that we get the basics right. Let me move on. This is a huge topic, and I want to try and at least touch the sides of it.