Job Risk Analysis
One profession at a time. Risk level, displacement horizon, what AI already does, and what human judgment still buys you. No spin. No false reassurance.
Academic researchers sit at Low risk, with a displacement horizon toward 2036. That number is not wrong, but it flatters the profession. AI is already doing the grunt work of research. What remains is judgment. The question is how long judgment stays scarce.
Account executives own the sales cycle. AI now owns much of the prospecting, sequencing, and pipeline forecasting that used to require junior AEs. The role is not disappearing in 2037. But it is already narrowing.
Accounting is one of the most rule-bound professions on earth. That used to be its protection. Now it is its primary exposure. AI automates ledger entry, reconciliation, and standard tax filings. 2028 is closer than it looks.
Actors are rated Low risk through 2050. That number protects the apex of the profession. It does not protect the working middle. Synthetic voices, AI extras, and deepfake dubbing are already restructuring the base of the industry.
The administrative assistant role is rated Moderate risk with a 2027 horizon. That is not a distant warning. It is a current event. AI tools already handle scheduling, email triage, meeting transcription, and travel booking. The function remains. The headcount does not.
Aerospace engineers are protected by regulatory barriers that slow AI adoption. FAA and EASA certification still requires human sign-off. But generative design and CFD simulation are already compressing engineering hours per project. 2035 is when the buffer runs out.
The AI engineer builds the systems replacing other jobs. Those same systems are now automating parts of their own work. AutoML, foundation model APIs, and agentic coding tools compress feature engineering, data cleaning, and model selection. 2042 is the horizon. The compression is already happening.
AI researchers are rated Low risk through 2058. They build the systems that automate everything else, and those systems cannot yet replace them. But every architecture they produce brings that moment closer. The protection is real. It is also recursive, and finite.
Plumbers sit at Low risk, with a horizon stretching toward 2055. Pipes, crawlspaces, and judgment calls under a sink resist automation the way spreadsheets never could. AI is entering the trade through diagnostics and dispatch, not through the wrench.
Nurses sit at Low risk, with a horizon toward 2035. AI is absorbing charting, early-warning detection, and triage support. The deeper crisis isn't automation. It's burnout driving two million licensed nurses out of bedside care.
Cybersecurity engineers sit at Moderate risk, with a horizon toward 2034. AI writes code riddled with new vulnerabilities faster than it patches old ones. Every efficiency gain on one side of the job creates more work on the other.
Air traffic controllers sit at Moderate risk, with a horizon toward 2038. AI is easing workload through sequencing and conflict-detection tools. The real crisis isn't automation eliminating the job. It's a shortage no algorithm can fill.
Anesthesiologists sit at Moderate risk, with a horizon toward 2048. In 2013, the FDA approved an AI system to automate routine sedation. By 2016, it was gone, not because it failed, but because the market never adopted it.
Animators sit at Moderate risk, with a horizon toward 2029. An industry-commissioned study found AI could disrupt over 100,000 animation jobs within three years. Pixar, DreamWorks, and Rooster Teeth have already cut staff. This isn't a forecast. It's underway.
AR developers sit at Moderate risk, with a horizon toward 2044. AI tools now generate 3D assets and scenes automatically. But before AI touched the job, Meta, Google, and Apple's AR bets had already collapsed the market around it.
Archivists sit at Moderate risk, with a horizon toward 2042. AI now reads handwriting and tags metadata across millions of pages. What it still can't do is the job's hardest task: deciding what deserves to survive.
Art directors sit at Low risk, with a horizon toward 2052. WPP and Omnicom have cut over 20,000 jobs citing AI. The junior rungs are disappearing. The person deciding what's good enough to ship is not.
Auditors sit at Moderate risk, with a horizon toward 2029. AI now reviews every transaction instead of a sample. What it can't do is sign the opinion, or carry the legal liability that comes with getting it wrong.
Backend engineers sit at Moderate risk, with a horizon toward 2042. A randomized study found experienced developers were 19% slower using AI on real codebases, even though they believed they'd sped up by 20%.
Bank tellers sit at High risk, with a horizon toward 2027. When ATMs arrived, tellers didn't disappear, they became salespeople. AI chatbots now handle hundreds of millions of interactions a year. This time, the job itself is shrinking.
Biologists sit at Moderate risk, with a horizon toward 2045. AlphaFold won its creators a Nobel Prize for predicting protein structures in minutes instead of years. It still can't design the experiment or know which structure actually matters.
Baristas sit at High risk, with a horizon toward 2031. Cafe X's robot poured coffee customers liked, then closed its San Francisco cafes anyway. Robot baristas thrive where there's a captive audience, not where there's competition.
Bartenders sit at High risk, with a horizon toward 2032. Robotic bars serve thousands of drinks on cruise ships and casino floors. But a $65,000 machine that can't read a room hasn't found a way into the neighborhood bar.
Biotech engineers sit at Moderate risk, with a horizon toward 2044. AI designs novel proteins and genomes from scratch now. The gap between a design that works on screen and one that works in a cell is where the job still lives.
Blockchain developers sit at Moderate risk, with a horizon toward 2044. Crypto job postings fell roughly 80% from their 2022 peak before AI became a factor. AI now automates contract boilerplate, but security auditing is going the other way.
Bookkeepers sit at High risk, with a horizon toward 2027. QuickBooks and Xero auto-categorize transactions and reconcile accounts now. Bench, North America's largest bookkeeping service, collapsed in 2024. The data-entry job is going; the advisory one may not arrive fast enough.
Building inspectors sit at Moderate risk, with a horizon toward 2043. Honolulu cut permit review from 73 days to 32 with AI. But over half the workforce retires within ten years, and the occupancy certificate is still a signature only a licensed human can give.
Bus drivers sit at High risk, with a horizon toward 2038. Scotland's flagship autonomous bus shut down after 21 months. Robotaxis run driverless in ten cities; buses still keep a safety operator aboard. Meanwhile agencies can't hire enough drivers.
Business analysts sit at Moderate risk, with a horizon toward 2030. The job is a bridge between business and engineering. AI now drafts the requirements, self-service analytics answers the questions, and no-code tools let the business skip the bridge entirely.
Business development managers sit at Moderate risk, with a horizon toward 2040. AI now handles the research and the cold outreach. It handles it so well, and so universally, that reply rates have collapsed and the genuine relationship is the last thing that works.
