There’s this certain category of human work that economists clearly want to put in a horrible basket marked “not worth paying for because AI can do it.” This group includes some outliers—model, for instance—but it’s mainly jobs in customer service, sales, administration. Many of these jobs are done from a desk, and involve interfacing between people and systems.
There’s real data now about what’s happening to these jobs in the AI era, and the trend is not great—although it’s clearly too soon to panic. Most notably, the year-long period ending in May of 2025 saw the raw number of customer service representatives drop by 130,180, a troubling 4.8% decrease.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) singled out 18 of these “artificial intelligence related occupations” as part of a 2024 report. It’s an intriguing list. Are you on it?
- Paralegals and legal assistants
- Graphic designers
- Broadcast announcers and radio disc jockeys
- Technical writers
- Interpreters and translators
- Insurance sales agents
- Sales representatives of services, except advertising, insurance, financial services, and travel
- Sales representatives, wholesale and manufacturing, technical and scientific products
- Sales representatives, wholesale and manufacturing, except technical and scientific products
- Models
- Sales engineers
- Procurement clerks
- Credit authorizers, checkers, and clerks
- Customer service representatives
- Executive secretaries and executive administrative assistants
- Legal secretaries and administrative assistants
- Medical secretaries and administrative assistants
- Secretaries and administrative assistants, except legal, medical, and executive
On Friday, in an annual data dump from BLS, it emerged that a depression in these “artificial intelligence related occupations” really does appear to be happening. This category was down by 0.2% from May of 2024 to May of 2025, a tiny drop, but one made more notable by employment in general trending up 0.8% in the same time period.
As Bloomberg notes, one outlier subcategory among those 18, “Medical secretaries and administrative assistants,” could be distorting the picture here, making the AI effect seem smaller than it actually is. Those jobs are hot; BLS got it wrong, for the time being anyway. Employment numbers across the others on the list dropped by 1.6%.
The original 2014 BLS report adds that while some jobs are “expected to be affected by the labor-saving effects of AI adoption, others are expected to experience a positive impact to their employment outlook.” This aligns with commentary from people like Ezra Klein who argue—or at least very loudly hope—that the AI-powered economy of the near future will be one in which new and better jobs come along to enrich our lives, taking the sting out of all the AI redundancies.
That’d be nice, but look at some of the jobs that AI has created so far, like the ones where people who used to work as graphic designers now fix hideous or error-riddled AI outputs. The existence of such new jobs doesn’t exactly fill me with optimism.
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