256,000 a year. That is the number of jobs that the report "An Analysis of the Macroeconomic Impact of AI," released on the 22nd by KDI senior research fellow Nam Chang-woo, expects automation to eliminate a decade from now. It amounts to 2.1% of all employed persons in 2024.
The same report projected that the spread of generative AI will raise Korea's total factor productivity by 1.5-3.5% over the next 10 years. Total factor productivity is the remaining productive power not explained by how much labor and capital were put in, in plain terms the ability to make more with the same resources.
Dividing 3.5% over 10 years into an annual average leaves the productivity growth rate rising by only about 0.35 percentage point each year. It is a size that is hard to feel.
The report expects the employment decline to be concentrated in mid- and high-skilled occupations such as professionals and office and sales workers. Among job groups with high AI exposure it listed R&D and information and communications along with management and clerical work, while face-to-face services and social welfare came out with a low likelihood of automation. As wage growth in high-paying occupations is held down, wage inequality across occupations is projected to improve slightly or hold at the current level in terms of the Gini coefficient. If the force narrowing the wage gap comes from pushing the top down rather than pulling the bottom up, the word improvement is hard to use as it stands.
Occupations with automation potential make up 72% of the total even at the current level of technology. Once costs are counted, the economic scale where automation actually holds up stays at 1.4% on a jobs basis and 1.8% on a revenue basis. A decade from now those shares grow to 8.1% and 10.5%. The gap between what is technically possible and what pays, and the period over which that gap narrows, is the time available to respond.
Revenue per regular employee at companies that adopted AI rose about 20%. Which period and which companies this analysis covered is not shown at the level of the report summary.
Alphabet's headcount rose by 11,830, from 187,103 on June 30, 2025 to 198,933 on the same day this year. Second-quarter revenue in 2026 was $119.8 billion (about 177 trillion won), up 24% from a year earlier, and the company hired more than 4,000 additional people in that quarter alone. That means a third of the one-year increase was packed into three months. The company also raised its capital expenditure outlook for this year from up to $190 billion to $195-205 billion.
Alphabet did not disclose which job groups it expanded. And this company let go about 12,000 people in 2023 and has cut staff several times since. Meta, Amazon and Microsoft have also cut thousands of workers since 2022.
That is the background to some 4,500 employees signing a petition asking Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai and three executives to strengthen measures preventing layoffs. Even as the total headcount grows, individual job insecurity stays the same.
In Korea the demands turned toward institutions. A survey released on the 24th found that 7 out of 10 people want a robot tax or a basic income introduced. Because the survey's sponsor and sample size were not disclosed along with it, it is early to use this figure directly as a basis for policy.
On factory floors it takes a more concrete form. The Hyundai Motor and Kia unions have made "future employment guarantees" a core demand in the 2026 wage and collective bargaining talks. In response to the demand that information on new businesses be shared and that labor and management consult on matters tied to employment, the company agreed to go through consultation procedures.
The union also submitted proposals to extend the retirement age, adopt a full monthly salary system, and require union agreement when production lines are rearranged. The Kia union has set up an AI committee internally.
Conflict over asset sales has spread as well. The Hyundai Wia union opposed the push to sell the special business division and demanded it be withdrawn, and the Hyundai Mobis office and research staff branch of the Korean Metal Workers' Union Gyeonggi chapter entered an all-out struggle over holding off the main contract, halting the sale, withdrawing forced transfers, and guaranteeing the right to refuse transfer and the succession of employment. In January, Hyundai Mobis signed a memorandum of understanding with the French parts maker OP Mobility to review the sale of its lamp business division and has been pushing ahead with the main contract. Hyundai Motor Group is hurrying its shift to SDVs, AI-based smart factories and the adoption of humanoid robots, and this sale sits within that flow.
The role the KDI asked of the government is that of a facilitator. In the short term it listed redesigning the tasks of occupations with high AI exposure and widening retraining, and running public cloud and shared GPU centers to lower the threshold for small and medium-sized companies. In the long term it called for spreading AI in a form that assists people in public services, creating industry-level AI governance and a labor-management-government consultative body, and closing the gaps in unemployment benefit coverage.
The figure of 256,000 points to conditions in a particular year a decade from now. In between, ten rounds of wage and collective bargaining will pass and retraining budgets will be drawn up ten times. Within the range the report sets out, what divides the outcome is whether retraining and consultation actually ran, more than the performance of the technology. The consultation procedure agreed between the Hyundai Motor union and the company faces its first test.
