Half of UK adults fear AI’s impact on jobs

Meanwhile new research from the US shows young workers already being hit

Half of adults in the UK are worried that AI will take or alter their jobs, according to a new poll. The news comes as fresh research from Stanford economists suggests young workers are already bearing the brunt of AI’s disruption.

A survey of 2,600 adults for the Trades Union Congress (TUC) found that 51% were concerned about the impact of AI on their employment. Job losses and changes to terms and conditions topped the list of worries, with younger people particularly anxious: nearly two-thirds (62%) of respondents aged 25 to 34 expressed concern.

The TUC poll comes as large employers including BT, Amazon and Microsoft have said advances in AI could lead to job cuts. Britain’s job market is already slowing amid a cooling economy, with unemployment at a four-year high of 4.7%, though most economists do not directly link this to AI adoption.

The union body argues that while AI could deliver productivity gains and improve public services, its deployment needs stronger worker safeguards. Half of respondents (50%) said they wanted a say in how AI is used at work, compared with just 17% who opposed this.

Kate Bell, assistant general secretary of the TUC, said: “AI could have transformative potential and if developed properly, workers can benefit from the productivity gains this technology may bring. The alternative is bleak. Left unmanaged and in the wrong hands, the AI revolution could entrench rampant inequality as jobs are degraded or displaced and shareholders get richer.”

The TUC is calling on the government to ensure workers share in a “digital dividend” by attaching conditions to public funding of AI research. These would include investments in skills, pay, working conditions and worker representation on company boards. Without such measures, it warns, AI could fuel “rampant inequality”, deteriorating job quality and social unrest.

AI weighing on employment for young workers

Concerns about AI are being echoed by new research in the US from Stanford University economists Erik Brynjolfsson, Bharat Chandar and Ruyu Chen. Analysing anonymised data on millions of employees from payroll processor ADP, the researchers found that AI is already weighing on employment for young workers in highly exposed fields such as software development, translation, customer service and reception roles.

“There’s a clear, evident change when you specifically look at young workers who are highly exposed to AI,” said Brynjolfsson. “After late 2022 and early 2023 you start seeing that their employment has really gone in a different direction than other workers.”

Among software developers aged 22–25, headcount was nearly 20% lower this July compared with its late-2022 peak. By contrast, older developers have continued to see employment growth, with researchers suggesting that career-hardened skills such as collaboration and product delivery remain more resistant to automation.

The findings raise a potential “labour-market paradox”: if entry-level work is automated away, future generations may struggle to gain the experience needed to replace today’s senior experts when they retire. “I think that we’ll have to more explicitly train people, as opposed to just hoping that they will figure these things out on their own,” Brynjolfsson said.