In 2023, artificial intelligence was capable of just a fraction of what it has achieved today. ChatGPT had just launched. Distorted AI photos and videos had just started to hit your timeline. The technology was improving, but adoption was slow and productivity gains were a dream away. Today, it’s being rapidly deployed across industries, and that pace has sounded the alarms for workforce researchers.
Professional services company Cognizant (number 217 on the 2026 edition of the Fortune 500) has reassessed its estimate of AI’s impact on the workplace, and the results are starker than before. They’ve updated their original forecast made in 2023—formulated by examining 18,000 tasks and nearly 1,000 jobs from the U.S. Department of Labor occupational data—to find that 93% of jobs could undergo at least some disruption from the technology. And the threat has become existential for a wider range of jobs. The research found that 30% of jobs could face an existential threat from AI, 15 percentage points higher than the initial assessment. In total, the report estimates AI-driven disruption could shift roughly $4.5 trillion in labor from humans to machines.
“We underestimated the impact of the technology,” the report reads. “What we projected might take until 2032 to unfold is happening now before our eyes.”
