A study by MIT University found that over 10% of the workforce can already be replaced by AI in the United States
Employees at the office, PHOTO: Shutterstock
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology released a study Wednesday that found artificial intelligence (AI) can already replace 11.7 percent of the United States workforce, equivalent to up to $1.2 trillion in wages in the financial, health and professional services fields, CNBC reports.
The study was conducted using a labor market simulation tool called the Iceberg Index, created by MIT and Oak Ridge National Laboratory. This index simulates how 151 million American workers across the country interact with and are affected by artificial intelligence and related policies.
Its creators say the Iceberg Index, announced earlier this year, offers a forward-looking view of how AI could reshape the labor market — not just in US tech hubs like Silicon Valley, but in every state across the country. For lawmakers preparing billions of dollars in reskilling and training investments, the index provides a detailed map of where disruptions are occurring, down to the zip code level.
“We're basically creating a digital twin for the US labor market,” said Prasanna Balaprakash, director of Oak Ridge National Laboratory and one of the people responsible for coordinating the research. The lab is a Department of Energy research center that houses the Frontier supercomputer — used for numerous large-scale modeling efforts.
Balaprakash explained that the index runs experiments at the population level, revealing how AI is reshaping tasks, skills and workflows long before these changes occur in the real economy.
The MIT-created tool analyzes job exposure to artificial intelligence down to the local level
The Iceberg Index treats the 151 million workers as individual agents, each labeled with skills, tasks, occupation and location. He maps more than 32,000 skills from 923 occupations in 3,000 US counties, then measures where current AI systems can already perform these skills.
What the researchers found is that the visible part of the iceberg—layoffs and role changes in technology, computer science, and information technology—accounts for just 2.2 percent of total payroll exposure, or about $211 billion. Beneath the surface is the total exposure, the $1.2 trillion in payroll, which includes routine functions in human resources, logistics, finance and office administration. These are areas sometimes overlooked in automation predictions.
But the index is not a prediction engine that estimates exactly when or where jobs will be lost, the researchers said. Instead, its goal is to provide a skills-centric overview of what current AI systems can already do, and to give policymakers a structured way to explore hypothetical scenarios before committing real money and enacting legislation.
“Project Iceberg allows policymakers and business leaders to identify areas of high exposure, prioritize investments in training and infrastructure, and test interventions before committing billions to implementation,” the researchers state.
