Job postings in 34 occupations classified as highly likely to be replaced by AI have fallen by more than half in three years. The finding comes from an analysis of 7.881 million postings over seven years listed on the Ministry of Employment and Labor's "Work24" platform, based on data the office of Rep. Park Hong-bae of the Democratic Party of Korea received from the ministry. Postings in those occupations fell 56.3%, from 104,441 in 2022 to 45,675 in 2025. The group includes bookkeeping clerks, office assistants, accounting clerks and data entry operators.
The decline is striking on its own, but total postings over the same period also fell 33.8%, from 1,488,715 to 985,044. That means an economic slowdown and a contraction in hiring underlie the figures. The share of the 34 occupations within the total fell from 7.02% to 4.64%, so the relative retreat is clear, but neither side has offered an estimate separating how much of that decline is attributable to AI. The ministry also drew a line, saying the Work24 statistics do not represent the labor market as a whole and serve as material for reading broad trends.
Overseas assessments have a different tone. In a report released on the 19th, BCG projected that 50-55% of U.S. jobs will be reshaped by AI within the next two to three years, while it put jobs with a possibility of disappearing entirely at 10-15%. The figures come from a review of roughly 165 million jobs in the United States using the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' JOLTS data and Revelio Labs' classification of about 1,500 roles. One side counted job postings and the other counted jobs, the countries differ between Korea and the United States, and one is an actual measurement while the other is a projection, so the two numbers cannot be set side by side to determine which is correct.
BCG divides jobs into two branches. There are "replacement" roles such as call center agents, where demand is unlikely to grow further, and "augmentation" roles, where the Jevons paradox operates and total demand rises as tools get cheaper. It classified software engineers in the latter group, and engineering headcount at AI-focused software companies did grow an average of 6.5% a year from 2023 to 2025, well above the industry average of 2.0%. In exchange, it found that demand for entry-level workers handling execution alone is falling and the threshold for entering senior roles is rising.
Domestic indicators make that optimism hard to accept as is. In national employment data, the number of workers in the IT sector including software development fell by about 42,000 in February this year from a year earlier, and IT job postings at small and medium-sized enterprises have contracted sharply compared with 2022. An Anthropic study assessed that 45% of general office clerk tasks and 67.1% of data entry operator tasks can be replaced by AI.
Placing the two results together, it is closer to the facts to say that different curves are being drawn between large companies and smaller ones. The Ministry of Economy and Finance has also begun work examining employment declines and the actual impact of AI in connection with the "AI industrial transition."
This is where the focus of the debate needs to shift. By the Statistics Korea count, the population reporting they were "resting" stood at 2.555 million in 2024, the highest since the tally began in 2003, and a report issued on the 20th by the Korea Enterprises Federation found that the number of people in their mid-to-late twenties who have given up looking for work has grown 2.6 times over 20 years. When the 2016 Davos Forum projected a net loss of 5.1 million jobs, aggregate estimates were the object of interest. What is needed now is a design for where the people who have left the labor market will move.
The first test of transition design is skills data. A "manufacturing tacit knowledge-based AI model development project," which converts the experience and intuition of master craftsmen in automobiles, electronics, shipbuilding, steel, chemicals, bio and machinery into data for AI training, was announced by the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy on the 17th. The Federation of Korean Trade Unions' manufacturing alliance issued a statement saying standards for compensating workers and plans for sharing the gains had been left out, demanding the project be halted and that labor and management hold joint discussions at the Economic, Social and Labor Council. With all three of the shipbuilding majors, HD Hyundai Heavy Industries, Samsung Heavy Industries and Hanwha Ocean, running AI/AX units, and HD Hyundai preparing a "master craftsman agent" that transfers the know-how of veteran engineers, the question of who owns the data is about to become a clause that has to be written into contracts.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said in a conversation at the Stanford Graduate School of Business that most people will lose their jobs to people who use AI. In a report from the enterprise AI platform Writer, 60% of executives said they were considering cutting staff who refuse to adopt AI, and employees who actively use AI were three times more likely to be promoted or receive a raise, which is the real-world version of that remark. The share an individual can carry by learning the tools differs from the share institutions have to bear, such as retraining and income support. The outlines of the latter will emerge along with the government's verification results, and how many people's names are written into the document that appears then will be the practical conclusion of this debate.
