A recent survey from Verdantix has showed that more than half of businesses expect AI to replace 10% of job roles in the next five years. Senior roles appear to be at greater risk, with companies anticipating cost savings through the elimination of management positions rather than frontline roles.
The survey, conducted with 252 senior executives in IT and AI functions, highlights an accelerating trend toward AI adoption. Over half of the respondents expect budgets for AI projects to grow by 10–24% within the next year. Even with this, only 11% believe computers with human-level intelligence will be a reality by 2030, indicating a cautious outlook on the limits of AI.
Which Jobs Are Most At Risk?
Sales, marketing, and customer service roles are seeing the most AI-related initiatives this year, accounting for 28% of such projects. This focus could indicate a growing comfort with using AI in these departments but also raises concerns about job security as the technology becomes more sophisticated.
At the same time, AI-human collaboration remains a priority for many organisations. Technologies like chatbots and tools for creative tasks are already widely used, with 72% of firms employing “AI in the human loop.” More autonomous systems, such as those designed for specific domains, have been deployed by a smaller percentage.
How Is AI Transforming Industries?
AI is also expected to impact transport sectors, with 67% of respondents predicting the adoption of human-AI co-pilots in maritime, rail, and aerospace industries by 2025. These innovations could show us a more collaborative future in which AI works with humans rather than fully replacing them in the short term.
Interestingly, 52% of firms describe their AI strategies as geared toward achieving competitive advantage. Faster processes are a top expectation, with 30% of executives citing this as the primary benefit of their AI projects over the next three years.
David Metcalfe, CEO of Verdantix said: “The findings show an upward trend in expected AI investment and integration in the coming years. How this plays out in the short and medium term though is very different.
“The immediate sees predominantly human machine cooperation, with AI augmenting or replacing parts of jobs. However, by 2030, though there is wide acknowledgement that computers won’t have the same intelligence level as humans, we are going to see full job role replacement in segments of the market as integration and AI autonomy beds in.
“This isn’t just a challenge for the existing workforce to face. It will naturally also affect future job creation. For example, using AI automation to increase the volume of audits without hiring more auditors. And it’s not just replacements and cuts – it’s shifts too. The complexity of AI technologies was cited as the most significant factor slowing AI adoption, suggesting a change in skills is also required.”
What Jobs Do Experts See At Risk?
When it comes to what experts think, the response is mixed. While some agree that AI won’t take jobs, others have different thoughts. Here is what they think…
Our Experts:
Michael Adjei, Director, Systems Engineering, Illumio
Hugo Farinha, Co-founder, Virtuoso QA
Dr Paul Sant, Head of Computer Science, The University of Law
Jessica Grisolia, Director of Retail Industry Solutions, Scandit
Shahar Goldboim, CEO and Co-Founder, Boom
Pascal Bensoussan, Chief Product Officer, Ivalua
Marcus Knight, Founder, BE GREEN AI
Mark Standen, Director of Technology, Acorn by Synergie
Michael Adjei, Director, Systems Engineering, Illumio
“CISOs will be forced to make a choice between investing in people or AI next year – and the majority will choose AI! This shift towards AI will exacerbate the skills gap, as funding will be channelled solely into AI competencies—a limited field—at the expense of internships and training courses.
“With regards to IT and cyber, the teams most likely to be affected by the move towards AI investments will be SOC teams, Incident Response teams, and programmers. Organisations will view these roles as ones that can be rapidly automated by AI, resulting in a loss of critical skills within these teams.”
Hugo Farinha, Co-founder, Virtuoso QA
“The immediate, and general, impact of AI will be the automation of administrative tasks, leading to a reduction in entry-level roles. Over the long term, this will shift the focus towards more strategic, analytical, and customer-facing positions as AI takes over routine tasks.
“For instance, we will see AI taking over decision-making tasks across several industries. In finance, AI can analyse vast amounts of market data to make real-time trading decisions, outperforming human traders.
“In healthcare, AI is set to revolutionise radiology and medical imaging by interpreting X-rays, MRIs, and CT scans with greater speed and accuracy than human radiologists, which may reduce the need for professionals who perform routine image analysis. Similarly, AI will enhance diagnostics, helping healthcare providers identify diseases and conditions early with data-driven precision.
“Even software engineering is seeing automation from AI. As auto-coding platforms and code generation algorithms speed up development, routine coding jobs, such as basic web development and app maintenance, are increasingly disappearing.”
Dr Paul Sant, Head of Computer Science, The University of Law
“The jobs most at risk of AI are those at the lower end of the skills market such as customer service (especially, e.g. call centres where AI is already being used, but also chatbots which are integrated into most websites), automation tasks (not strictly AI, but a subset) where there are many repetitive simple steps to follow and aspects of logistics (again, focusing on automation rather than newer technologies in AI such as Generative AI).
“Some market analysis roles may also be at risk given that AI can trawl and identify patterns quickly is petabytes of data.
“However, some caution is needed as AI-systems are not totally foolproof and can still hallucinate or provide incorrect answers. The advent of explainable AI will allow these errors to be picked up, and whilst some roles may be replaced, new ones will be created – those who will be replaced are those who refuse to engage with AI, but those who are willing to adapt may well find new and exciting roles.”
Jessica Grisolia, Director of Retail Industry Solutions, Scandit
“Retail is one industry where AI is already having an impact and will emerge to play a greater role. Earlier in 2024, we found that half of retail store associates are not worried about AI and automation replacing their jobs with 31% believing it could positively impact their role.
“With the labour market shifts in retail specifically, and Gen Z entering the workforce who are more open to newer technologies, AI can act as a valued co-pilot. Whether it is for quicker onboarding/training or prioritising tasks to drive ROI based on sales patterns through actionable insights, AI can help bridge the knowledge gap that retailers will have to address.”
Shahar Goldboim, CEO and Co-Founder, Boom
“AI doesn’t spell doom for our jobs. Instead, AI enhances and supercharges our teams, making the dry tasks easier and allowing workers to focus on where they can really make a difference. AI will never replace the empathy and creativity humans bring to the table. Guests want to feel valued and cared for by real humans, and that will never change.
“AI can help property managers assess and improve team performance with data. By automating tasks like scheduling, data entry, and performance tracking, AI frees managers to focus on strategic planning, operational improvements, and team development. Instead of spending hours on the nitty-gritty, AI can manage everything from maintenance alerts to cleaning staff scheduling, all while giving you a bird’s eye view of the entire business and spotting issues before they become problematic.”
Pascal Bensoussan, Chief Product Officer, Ivalua
“In 2025, Generative AI (GenAI) will tackle the procurement and supply chain industry’s AI skills gap by becoming more autonomous and user-friendly. Despite plenty of experimenting taking place since 2023, many teams have not integrated GenAI into their day-to-day workflows. But, as semantic data retrieval, AI orchestration, and LLM technologies advances, Generative AI systems are becoming more intelligent and more autonomous.
“Next year, we will see the emergence of AI agents that are capable of understanding high-level directives and act autonomously on specific events, evaluate options, make decisions, and generate detailed analytics, forecasts, and recommendations. Procurement and supply chain professionals will be able to interact with those AI-powered assistants by simply describing their needs in natural language, without having to master complex prompt engineering or coding skills. This will dramatically lower the barrier to entry for using – and benefitting from AI
“With more users across the business, GenAI will become the de facto corporate ‘business operating system’, fundamentally reshaping the user experience. Rather than being simple “one-and-done” features sprinkled across the spend management suite, assistants will act as a central interface or in the background, seamlessly integrating data sources, decision-making models, and workflow automations into one unified space. As a result, AI will dynamically adapt to support everything from procurement to demand forecasting, helping teams to focus on more high-value tasks and adding strategic value.”
Marcus Knight, Founder, BE GREEN AI
“Whilst chatbots have been making a steady increase in popularity over the past year, with businesses looking to reduce their support team costs, 2025 is likely to be a tipping point for the support sector, as conversational and highly convincing voice AI agents become more accessible. This will effect almost every business sector.
“Like how we saw supermarket till workers be replaced with self-service tills and a single person overseeing them, the introduction of more and more sophisticated AI agents, along with fully reactive AI dashboards, will mean that entire support teams can be managed by a single human, able to approve decisions and acting as a fail-safe should an AI agent not be able to meet the customer’s requirement.
“With over an estimated 1 million people working in customer support in the UK alone, a modest reduction of only 30% would mean 30,000 jobs lost. Whilst driving innovation is a crucial factor in stimulating the economy, we need to find assurances that the additional revenue created from AI, is pumped into human-centric initiatives such as training and education.”
Mark Standen, Director of Technology, Acorn by Synergie
“Market Intelligence has provided a great deal of information around the job losses with regards to AI and whilst some commentators have said this will be a determent to Humans there are fundamental upsides to the creation of a new way of working.
“Yes, there will be tasks that are better afforded to AI and Automation – Mundane tasks can be completed with greater accuracy in administration, Human Resources, Finance and Preperations. However, humans will still need to be a face to these departments. What will happen is productivity will increase within these teams and more will be able to be completed in these departments.
“What will also happen much like when the World Wide Web was released to humanity is the creation of opportunities we didn’t know about or have in 2025. The technology development will create many opportunities within fields like AI and Machine Learning, Data Analysts and Scientists and Digital Transformation specialists.
“Jobs requiring empathy, creativity or intricate human interactions are less likely to be fully replaced by AI. While AI will help and increase knowledge there is always going to need to be “Human in the loop” engagement.
“The future is extremely bright and the job market and skill needs will only increase as it has done in every industrial revolution to date.”
