AI Is Rewiring Careers

 

Public discussions about AI often focus on a single question: Which jobs will disappear?

It's the wrong question.

What we're seeing in the labour market is not widespread job elimination. It's widespread job transformation.

Our latest analysis of more than 418,000 career transitions reveals that the occupations experiencing the greatest disruption are often not the ones making headlines. While public attention remains focused on tech-related roles, some of the highest levels of occupational displacement are occurring in customer operations, office support, logistics coordination, project coordination, and service operations roles.

Customer Operations, for example, shows a job displacement rate of more than 90%, Logistics Coordinators 87% or Customer Service Representative at almost 85%.

At first glance, this seems counterintuitive.

But the data points to an important reality: AI is not simply replacing jobs, it's changing roles and the skills required to do them.

The Power of Transferable Skills

Many of the roles experiencing the highest levels of transformation contain significant amounts of routine, repeatable work. Activities such as scheduling, documentation, information gathering, administrative coordination, transaction processing, and standard customer interactions are increasingly being automated or augmented by AI.  

As those tasks are absorbed, the remaining work becomes more dependent on uniquely human capabilities: judgment, problem-solving, stakeholder management, relationship-building, decision-making, and leadership.

Today, 72% of vacancies in high-AI-exposure occupations require at least one management skill, demonstrating that as AI exposure increases, those human-centric capabilities become increasingly valuable.

This suggests the emerging divide is not technical versus non-technical workers.

Instead, those who build and showcase transferable skills will be best positioned to remain relevant and in demand across a range of functions and industries, regardless of how roles evolve.

Career reinvention has become increasingly commonplace

Nearly 6 in 10 displaced workers move into an entirely different occupation following a redundancy, a figure that has remained remarkably consistent over four consecutive years.

At the same time, workers often lack visibility into how to navigate those transitions. Our research shows that 78% of workers would welcome a new career path but don't know how to achieve it, while more than half are unsure which skills or training will help them remain competitive.

"People often underestimate how transferable their experience is," said Khasagerova. "A career pivot isn't starting over. In many cases, it's applying existing strengths in a new context. Once workers begin looking at their skills instead of their job titles, the number of opportunities available to them expands significantly."

This is where AI can play a much more positive role in workforce transformation.

At LHH, we've built AI directly into solutions like Career Studio to support career exploration, skill development, and career mobility at scale.

Rather than leaving workers guess their next move, AI can help them:

• Identify transferable skills and discover realistic adjacent career opportunities
• Understand skills gaps between current and future roles
• Build stronger, more targeted professional profiles and optimise resumes and applications for evolving job requirement
• Prepare for interviews through instant feedback and targeted advice
• Expand networking strategies and uncover relevant opportunities
• Explore personalised learning and upskilling pathways

This transforms AI from a source of uncertainty into a source of career intelligence.

Instead of asking "What job am I qualified for?" workers can begin asking "What careers am I capable of building?"

Career Mobility is becoming a business imperative

The implications extend beyond career transition.

As organisations face ongoing workforce restructuring, skills shortages, and accelerating technology adoption, many are discovering that the challenge is not simply finding talent. It's understanding how existing talent can be redeployed.

The data shows that workers rarely transition into only one logical destination. Customer operations professionals, for example, have the skills to move into sales, operations, supply chain, project management, marketing, consulting, and other adjacent functions.

Most organisations lack visibility into these talent pathways. Yet these pathways create significant opportunities for internal mobility and redeployment.

When employers can map transferable skills, identify adjacent roles and provide targeted upskilling support, they can preserve institutional knowledge, reduce hiring costs, and retain valuable talent that might otherwise be lost through restructuring.

This is why we believe AI-powered workforce intelligence should be applied long before employees enter career transition programmes.

The same technology that helps displaced workers identify future opportunities can help organisations create internal mobility pathways before displacement occurs.

The future of outplacement is not just placement

The traditional goal of outplacement was helping someone find another job.

Today's workforce requires something broader.

People need support navigating a labour market where careers are becoming less linear, skills requirements are changing faster, and reinvention is increasingly common. Nearly 60% of workers now move into different occupations after displacement, while 87% of HR leaders report recent or planned redundancies and more than three-quarters say redundancies have become a recurring part of workforce planning.

That changes the definition of effective career transition support.

The "right" outplacement support for today's environment combines expert coaching, labour market intelligence, AI-powered career exploration, skills development, interview readiness, and personalised transition pathways. It helps individuals not only secure their next role, but take ownership of their career.

Ultimately, AI's greatest impact on work may not be the jobs it changes. It may be the careers it helps create.