In the third-quarter 2025 wage employment trends released by the National Data Agency (국가데이터) on Feb. 24, total wage jobs as of August 2025 came to 20,927,000, up 139,000 from a year earlier. In the same tally, jobs held by people in their 20s and younger fell by 127,000. It produced a combination in which the total rose while one age group alone dropped out. The release also noted that the decline in information and communications, which includes software development, was pronounced.
On the same day, Cheon Kyung-rok, an economic analyst at the National Assembly Budget Office, published a report titled "Occupations Highly Exposed to Generative AI and Recent Youth Employment." An AI exposure index quantifies how easily the tasks of a given occupation can be replaced or assisted by generative AI, and this report applied an index created by the International Labour Organization (ILO) to Korea's occupational classification. Accounting and bookkeeping clerks, finance and insurance clerks and specialists, customer service and monitoring agents, and computer and software developers were classified as highly exposed occupations.
The report's regression results run against the conventional view. From November 2022, when ChatGPT appeared, through the first half of 2025, no result was found showing that employment in highly exposed occupations declined significantly. The rate of change in employment for occupations with high AI exposure came out higher than for other occupations by 1.2 percentage points among young people, 0.66 percentage points for ages 35-49, and 1.4 percentage points for those 50 and older. Regression analysis is a statistical technique that puts several factors in together and isolates the effect of one variable.
By occupational group, the picture splits. Among accounting and bookkeeping clerks, customer service and monitoring agents, and writers and media professionals, a trend of falling youth employment was observed. Computer systems and software specialists, finance and insurance specialists, and human resources and management specialists were on the rising side. In youth hiring as well, telemarketers and accounting and bookkeeping clerks fell while finance and insurance clerks and specialists, writers, interpreters and translators rose, and the report stated that a causal link with the spread of generative AI was not confirmed.
In the developer occupational group, the opposite pictures exist side by side. A tally introduced on Feb. 25, based on data from the Korea Employment Information Service, put the decline in domestic IT developer jobs at 5,000, or 7.8 percent over 21 months. In the Budget Office's classification, the same category shows an upward trend. The two results are hard to compare directly because their sources, occupational definitions and tally periods differ.
Chung Heung-jun, a professor of business administration at Seoul National University of Science and Technology, said he sees the burden showing up as reduced hiring of people in their 20s, since companies are expanding their use of AI and automation while finding it hard to cut existing staff. An employee also said there had been a mood at Pangyo companies of holding back on entry-level hiring since late last year. Statements of this kind are not the sort that can be confirmed by statistics, so they can only be treated as grounds for interpretation. The government has begun a survey to gauge the effect of AI's spread on employment, and the scope of the survey and the timing of its release have not been made public.
There are also attempts to re-measure the growth AI itself has generated. Jason Furman, a professor at Harvard University, held that AI-related spending drove a substantial share of growth in the $31 trillion (about 44,810 trillion won) U.S. economy over the nine months through September 2025. The assessment of Jan Hatzius, chief economist at Goldman Sachs, is different.
His view is that a large share of the AI investment the United States is pouring out only lifts the GDP of Korea and Taiwan and does not come back to U.S. GDP. SK Hynix's HBM market share was put at 62 percent and its fourth-quarter 2025 operating margin at 58 percent.
The market has begun to react at the level of individual job tasks. Within a day of Anthropic unveiling "Claude Code Security," CrowdStrike fell 8.0 percent, Cloudflare 8.1 percent and SailPoint 9.4 percent. On Feb. 23, IBM's stock dropped 13 percent for its worst day in 25 years, and Claude Code's COBOL modernization feature was cited as the reason. One tally showed that about $1 trillion in market capitalization evaporated from global software and services stocks in the month after Jan. 28.
The analysis in the Budget Office report stops at statistics through 2025. The unusual drop in employment in professional, scientific and technical services in January 2026 is not included in it. One CEO warned that half of entry-level office jobs could disappear before 2030 and unemployment could reach 20 percent, but a forecast like this is something to be verified, not a premise.
For someone who has to choose a career path now, the question of whether AI reduces jobs is of little use. Work such as entering accounting vouchers and reading counseling scripts was observed moving toward decline, and within the same accounting field, work that requires a person to weigh things moved differently. What matters in preparing for a job is not the name of the occupation.
One should look at what portion of a day's work consists of repetitive procedures. When the results of the government survey come out, there will be grounds to check that share by job task.
