From entry-level roles to highly skilled professions, new research reveals how artificial intelligence is reshaping cognitive work, with the UAE emerging as a key global AI hub.
For all the noise around artificial intelligence, the most important changes are still happening quietly.
More than three years after the launch of ChatGPT, AI has not yet dramatically rewritten employment statistics in a way most data can easily capture. But according to a joint study by Coface and the Observatory of Threatened and Emerging Jobs (OEM), the real shift is already underway—just not where we were looking.
It is beginning at the edges of the labour market. And increasingly, it is moving inward.
The jobs we thought were safe are no longer entirely safe
What makes this phase of automation different is not that it replaces repetitive work. That story is already familiar.
Instead, AI is now moving into something far more sensitive: cognitive, skilled, and non-routine tasks.
Roles in engineering, finance, law, administration, IT, and even creative and analytical professions are now showing meaningful exposure to automation—not in theory, but in task-level breakdowns of how the work itself is structured.
The study suggests that in the most advanced scenarios, roughly one in eight occupations could have more than 30% of their tasks automated. That does not mean the disappearance of those jobs—but it does point to something more subtle and arguably more disruptive: a restructuring of what those jobs actually involve.
It starts with tasks, not titles
Instead of treating “jobs” as fixed units, the study breaks them down into individual tasks, and then into even smaller “elementary actions”—the building blocks of work itself.
AI does not replace professions in one sweep. It replaces fragments of work.
Writing reports, analysing data, drafting legal summaries, building financial models, coordinating workflows—each of these may be partially automated, reshaping roles from within rather than removing them outright.
A quiet reordering of professional security
Highly cognitive occupations—law, finance, engineering, IT, and management—now show some of the highest proportions of automatable tasks.
By contrast, roles rooted in physical presence, manual work, or direct human interaction remain comparatively less exposed.
The result is a more nuanced divide than previous waves of automation suggested. It is no longer simply manual versus knowledge work, but increasingly standardisable cognition versus human judgment.
And that boundary is still being defined.
The UAE and the geography of AI exposure
Exposure to AI is not evenly distributed. It depends heavily on the structure of each economy.
Knowledge-intensive economies show higher exposure, while more physically oriented labour markets remain comparatively less affected.
Within this global shift, the UAE and wider Gulf region occupy a distinctive position: simultaneously exposed to AI-driven transformation, and actively investing in becoming a global AI infrastructure hub.
As the study notes, countries such as the UAE and Saudi Arabia are committing significant resources to data centres, compute capacity, and national AI platforms—treating AI not only as an application layer, but as core economic infrastructure.
Expert insight
Mohamad Jomaa, CEO and Country Manager for GCC and Egypt at Coface, notes that the region’s strategy reflects a deeper understanding of where future competitiveness will be defined.
“The UAE and Saudi Arabia are moving decisively to position themselves as global AI and compute hubs. Commitments measured in the tens of billions of dollars including multigigawatt data center campuses, advanced GPU capacity, and national AI platforms signal a clear understanding that AI competitiveness starts with infrastructure. These are not pilot initiatives; they are long-term, sovereign-level investments designed to anchor economic diversification and global relevance in a data-driven world.”
— Mohamad Jomaa, CEO and Country Manager, Coface GCC & Egypt
The deeper question is not jobs—it is value
Beyond employment, the more profound shift lies in how value is created and distributed.
If AI automates parts of high-skilled work, the balance between labour and capital begins to shift. More of the value in the system accrues to infrastructure, models, and compute capacity, rather than to human output alone.
This raises wider implications—for taxation, education systems, and the signalling power of qualifications.
If parts of professional work become partially automated, the link between long educational pathways and job security may weaken. Not disappear—but loosen.
What remains human becomes more valuable
Work is not disappearing. It is being redistributed.
Some tasks are absorbed by systems. Others are elevated. And some become newly valuable precisely because they resist automation.
Judgment, accountability, context, and trust remain difficult to standardise—and therefore harder to replace.
In that sense, the definition of value is quietly shifting toward what remains uniquely human.
A transformation still unfolding
The study is careful not to overstate certainty. It does not equate exposure with job loss. Nor does it ignore the friction that slows real-world adoption.
But its conclusion is clear:
AI is no longer operating at the edges of work.
It is moving directly into its core—and in doing so, it is beginning to reshape not just employment, but the structure of value itself.
