The question is usually asked badly. “Will AI replace my job?” invites a yes or no, and the honest answer to almost every job is no. But that is not reassuring, because the data shows something more specific happening — and more awkward.
AI is not replacing occupations. It is replacing a layer inside them: the part where somebody else has already decided what needs doing, and the work is carrying it out. That layer exists inside almost every job, and in some jobs it is the entire role.
What 180 million job postings show
The clearest picture comes from an analysis of 180 million global job postings between January 2023 and October 2025. Total postings fell 8% in 2025 — that is the baseline everything below is measured against.
Against that benchmark, some roles fell off a cliff:
Fell hardest
Grew or held
Look at what is on the left. Computer graphic artists, writers, photographers, medical scribes, compliance specialists. Now look at what survived in the same creative industries: creative directors, managers and producers held steady.
Same field. Same tools. The difference is that one group decides what gets made and the other makes it.
The clearest single number
In that dataset, senior leadership roles fell 1.7%. Individual contributor roles fell 9%. Against a market down 8% overall, seniority was worth roughly seven percentage points of protection.
The same split, from a completely different source
The US Bureau of Labor Statistics does not analyse job adverts — it builds ten-year occupational projections. It arrives at the same place.
Between 2025 and 2035, the BLS projects software developers, QA analysts and testers to grow 10%, against 3% for all occupations. Over the identical decade, it projects computer programmers to decline 7%, losing 8,100 jobs.
To anyone outside the industry those are the same job. The BLS attributes the difference to the automation of programming tasks and to higher-skilled work shifting towards developers. Writing the code is the exposed part. Deciding what to build is not.
Where it is already happening, by name
Two announcements from 2025 and 2026 show the mechanism rather than the forecast.
IT service desks
ServiceNow announced the first member of what it calls its Autonomous Workforce: a Level 1 Service Desk AI specialist, shipping in Q2 2026. It handles password resets, software access provisioning and network troubleshooting. Internally, ServiceNow reports it is already handling more than 90% of employee requests, and is almost twice as fast as human agents.
L1 support is the textbook case. The ticket arrives with the problem already defined. The resolution path is documented. The work is execution, start to finish.
This matters for UK pay in a very concrete way. ONS figures for 2025 put the median Information Technology Technician — the L1 and L2 tier — at between £30,494 in the North East and £41,690 in London. Information Technology Professionals, the tier above, sit between £48,344 and £70,000. The automation is landing squarely on the lower band, which is also the band most people use to enter the industry.
Sales development
In B2B software, 36% of companies cut SDR and BDR headcount over twelve months — the steepest reduction of any sales function. Only 19% increased it, the lowest growth rate of any sales role. Account executives fared better, with 25% of companies cutting.
The most telling comparison is sales engineers: only 14% of companies cut them, and 17% added. Sales engineering is the part of selling that requires judgement about a specific customer’s technical problem. Outbound prospecting at volume is the part that does not.
The counter-example worth taking seriously
Every narrative deserves a test, and the network engineer is a good one. These lists routinely put network engineering in the “dying career” column: infrastructure as code, cloud abstraction, automation.
UK data disagrees. In the six months to 15 October 2026, the median advertised salary for a Network Engineer was £57,500, up 4.6% year on year, across 1,271 permanent postings. Its demand ranking rose from 296th to 178th.
Meanwhile Software Engineer — the role everyone agrees is safe — saw its median advertised salary fall 12.5%, from £80,000 to £70,000, on 6,140 postings.
What that tells you
Narratives about which careers are dying are generated by what is interesting to write about, not by what is happening in job adverts. The unglamorous role went up. The prestigious one went down.
And then it reversed
There is a twist in the most recent data. Indeed’s Hiring Lab found that between 2022 and 2026, the more exposed an occupation was to AI, the more its postings declined — the relationship everyone expected.
Then it flipped. Software development postings grew almost 15% between February 2025 and June 2026 while overall postings fell 7%. Indeed’s researchers point at agentic coding tools as the likely catalyst.
But read the composition before celebrating. Of that growth between May 2025 and May 2026, 71% came from senior roles and 37% from jobs with AI in the title. Software postings overall remain 27.5% below their pre-pandemic level.
So the recovery is real, and it is concentrated exactly where the earlier decline was not: at the top.
What this means for you
Audit your week, not your job title. How much of it is work where somebody already decided what needed doing? That fraction is your exposure. It is a far better estimate than anything based on your role name.
The threatened layer is also the entry layer. L1 support, junior content production, outbound prospecting — these are how people have always got into technology, media and sales without a specialist degree. That is the genuinely difficult part of this, and it is covered in more depth in our piece on the entry-level squeeze.
Judgement is the hedge, not tooling. Sales engineers outperformed SDRs. Creative directors outperformed graphic artists. Software developers outperformed programmers. In every pair, the protected role is the one that decides what the work should be.
Ignore anyone certain about five years out. The AI-exposure correlation reversed sign within a single year. Anyone who told you in 2024 exactly how 2026 would look got it wrong, and that includes the people who were right for the first eighteen months.
Sources
- Bloomberry — analysis of 180 million job postings, January 2023 to October 2025
- US Bureau of Labor Statistics — Occupational Outlook Handbook, 2025–2035 projections
- Indeed Hiring Lab — AI and job postings: from destruction to creation, July 2026
- CIO.com — ServiceNow L1 service desk automation announcement
- SaaStr — B2B sales development team headcount survey, 2025
- ITJobsWatch — UK permanent vacancies, six months to 15 October 2026
- ONS Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings 2025 (provisional), Table 15(3)