BofA throws cold water on AI apocalypse panic: 60% of today’s jobs didn’t exist in 1940

The doomsday crowd may want to check its history books.

As fears of an AI-driven jobs apocalypse intensify across boardrooms, union halls, and college campuses, Bank of America’s global research team is urging a reality check. In a report published April 28, BofA economists argue that the “Armageddon narrative” around artificial intelligence “sits uneasily with both economic theory and the evidence so far” — and they’ve got 85 years of labor market data to back them up.

The bank’s central argument is simple: 60% of the jobs that exist in the United States today didn’t exist in 1940. Data scientists, social media managers, and cloud developers “barely existed 20 years ago but are now mainstream jobs.” Agriculture, which employed roughly 40% of Americans in the early 1900s, now accounts for just 1% of U.S. employment.

In each case of transformation — the Industrial Revolution, electrification, computerization — the economy didn’t just survive the disruption. It invented its way out of it.

“Adaptability is the new job security,” the report concludes.

One in four jobs at risk

The bank isn’t sugarcoating AI’s reach. Globally, roughly 840 million jobs, about one in four, are exposed to generative AI, with high-income economies facing the steepest exposure at 33% of all jobs. Younger workers, women, and the highly educated face the greatest disruption risk, largely because they’re concentrated in the white-collar, language-intensive, and administrative roles that AI can most readily assist or automate.

But BofA drew a sharp distinction between exposure and elimination. According to International Labor Organization data cited in the report, 13% of global jobs sit in the “augmentation” category — meaning AI will enhance, not replace, those workers — versus just 2.3% with genuine automation potential.

“GenAI will primarily augment rather than replace workers,” the bank writes, with professional and financial services standing to benefit most and repetitive roles in customer service, information/communications technology, and administration facing the highest substitution risk.

The ATM argument — and its limits

BofA leans heavily on a favorite economist’s parable: the ATM. When automated teller machines proliferated in the 1970s and ’80s, conventional wisdom held that bank tellers were finished. Instead, lower operating costs allowed banks to open more........

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