This week Barry Phillips takes a look at some of the most significant AI reports of the year to so far.

Transcript:

Hello Humans !

And welcome to the weekly podcast that summarises, in five minutes or less, an important AI development relevant to world of HR. I'm Barry Phillips.

This week, as we hurtle toward the end of 2025, we're taking a first look at some of the most significant reports published since January that give us at least some indication of just how AI is developing and impacting the workplace.

Let's start in January with the World Economic Forum report, which predicted that by 2030, 170 million new jobs will emerge due to AI, while 92 million will be displaced. There are two points worth noting here. First, 2030 is a big number and feels some distance away, but it's little more than four years. Secondly, even if the World Economic Forum is right about this major net gain, it doesn't follow that we won't witness a significant spike in unemployment along the way. Just listen to this week's Amazon announcement. There will be no smooth handover of the jobs baton here. Jobs will be lost—initially at a far greater rate than new AI-driven roles appear. Think of it less as a relay race and more as... well, a bit of a fumble in the handover zone.

By summer, we'd heard from PwC with their Global AI Jobs Barometer Report. And for those fearing for their jobs, there was actually some good news: if you manage to hold onto yours and you're working in AI, you could expect a pay rise. Workers with AI skills, the report claimed, now command a 56% wage premium—up from 25% last year.

Now, how much of this reflects the frankly silly salaries being dished out earlier this year in Silicon Valley during the AI war for talent isn't exactly clear. But even a handful of these monster packages—complete with eye-watering share options—have the potential to skew any set of figures dramatically northward.

By September, even the newly formed AICC—that's the Artificial Intelligence Collaboration Centre based in Northern Ireland—was submitting its own report, claiming there were now some 1,340 full-time roles in AI across firms in Northern Ireland. That's not many, admittedly, but don't forget Northern Ireland is small, with a population of fewer than 2 million. And these are jobs that are partly or mainly AI-driven. Add to this those employees who use some sort of AI every day, and its fair to assume there are at least a million regular users of AI in the workplace in Northern Ireland .

I make this bold guess largely due to another report issued last month. A report by Wharton in the US, states that 82% of senior leaders are now using GenAI weekly—up from just 27% three years ago.

This is significant, and it follows our own polling of HR professionals over the past year. In May 2024, we found around a third of HR professionals were claiming to use GenAI at least occasionally. That figure had risen to nearly 70% by June of this year.

So what can we conclude from all of this? I think it's threefold: First, there will be significant job losses as we make the leap from AI displacing jobs to AI creating new ones—and that transition won't be pretty. Second, if we don't have wholesale adoption of AI just yet, we can assume we will soon, and that it will become as ubiquitous as the Microsoft Office suite became in the 2000s. And perhaps most importantly, AI needs to be considered separate from other technological advances we've witnessed since the end of Covid—like VR and AR, which have rather fallen out of fashion and, in any event, hovered around the very blurred edges of workplace utility.

AI isn't going anywhere except deeper and wider.

Until next week bye for now