Employers told the WEF what they expect AI to do by 2030

The setup

The World Economic Forum published its Future of Jobs Report 2025 on 7 January 2025, the sixth edition of a biennial survey that asks employers directly what they expect to reshape jobs and skills over a five-year horizon, in this case 2025 to 2030. Accessed here through an archived copy of the publisher's page, the report states it draws on the perspective of more than 1,000 global employers, collectively representing over 14 million workers across 22 industry clusters and 55 economies, a large but self-selected panel of sizeable organizations rather than a random sample of the world's employers.

What the documents show

The report's published findings are framed consistently in expectation language: 86% of surveyed employers expect AI and information-processing technologies to transform their business by 2030, alongside 58% for robotics and automation. Employers also reported forward-looking plans rather than completed actions, including that roughly half plan to reorient their business in response to AI, two-thirds plan to hire staff with specific AI skills, and 40% anticipate reducing their workforce in areas AI can automate. AI and big data top the report's own list of fastest-growing skills employers say they need.

The friction

Every one of those figures is what an employer said it expects or plans, not a measured change in employment that has already happened; the report's own repeated use of words like expected and anticipate is the tell. A biennial survey of large, internationally networked employers is also not designed to capture how small firms, informal-sector employers, or firms in the least represented of the 55 covered economies think about the same five-year horizon, since the panel skews toward organizations large enough to have someone answering on the firm's behalf.

What changed in the work

What a report like this adds is a structured, cross-country read of what large employers say they are planning to do about AI, useful for a reader gauging sentiment ahead of budget or hiring decisions, but it is not evidence that any of the reported plans will actually occur, and the report itself does not claim otherwise; it describes stated intentions as of the survey window, not outcomes.

• Is a Future of Jobs figure describing an employer's plan or expectation, or an employment change already observed?
• Does the panel behind the number represent large multinational employers, smaller firms, or both?
• Has the five-year forecast window used in this edition been preserved when the figure gets requoted years later?

Comparing this report's 2025 forecasts against the Forum's own later employment data when a future edition arrives would be one useful way to test how these employer expectations held up, a check the report's biennial cycle itself is built to eventually allow.