Just posted to my Forbes column about a new study suggesting that 93% of jobs in the U.S. can now be done at least partially by AI, representing up to $4.5 trillion in potential labor shifts. The scale of change is staggering, and it’s happening faster than many expected.
In my conversation with Cognizant CTO Babak Hodjat on the TechFirst podcast, we unpacked how researchers analyzed more than 18,000 tasks across 1,000 jobs and found that AI exposure is accelerating.
Software development, finance, management, legal roles, and administrative work are among the most impacted. Even physical fields like transportation and construction are seeing meaningful jumps. But importantly, “exposure” doesn’t mean replacement. It means a significant portion of tasks can be automated or assisted, not that entire professions disappear.
“The surprise was that some of the tasks we were expecting to be automated later on are already being automated,” Hodjat told me. With rapid advances in agentic and multimodal AI, that $4.5 trillion figure could grow.
And while one engineer recently said nearly 100% of his code is now written by AI, Hodjat stressed that human context, creativity, and expertise still matter deeply.