Employers anticipate a significant shift in the division of labour between humans, machines and algorithms for the tasks of today. Currently an average of 71% of total task hours across the industries covered by our Future of Jobs Report are performed by humans, compared to 29% by machines or algorithms.

By 2022 this average is expected to have shifted to 58% task hours performed by humans, and 42% by machines or algorithms. In terms of total working hours, no work task is yet performed predominantly by machines or algorithms today. By 2022, 62% of organization’s data processing and information search and transmission tasks will be performed by machines. Relative to their starting point today, the expansion of machines’ share of work task performance will be particularly marked in reasoning and decision-making, administrative and information search tasks. Even work tasks overwhelmingly performed by humans today — communicating, interacting, coordinating, managing and advising — will begin to be taken on by machines, although to a lesser degree