How Will AI Affect Your Job? What Australian Workers Need to Know

Two of the most credible voices in artificial intelligence have put numbers on what many workers already fear.

Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic (the company behind Claude AI), told Axios in May 2025 that AI could eliminate half of all entry-level white-collar jobs within five years and spike unemployment to as much as 10-20%. His exact words: "It's going to happen in a small amount of time — as little as a couple of years or less." He singled out technology, finance, legal, and consulting as sectors facing the sharpest cuts.

Andrej Karpathy, co-founder of OpenAI and former head of AI at Tesla, released an interactive US Job Market Visualizer in March 2026 that scores 342 occupations on a 0-10 AI exposure scale. The average score across all jobs was 5.3 out of 10. Medical transcriptionists scored a perfect 10. Software developers scored 8-9. Roofers and tradespeople scored 0-1.

The pattern Karpathy found is uncomfortable: the higher your salary, the higher your exposure. Jobs paying over $100,000 averaged 6.7 on his scale. Jobs paying under $35,000 averaged 3.4. The desk is more at risk than the worksite.

Australia doesn't have its own Karpathy-style dashboard yet, but the pattern is clear from both international research and local reports from CSIRO, the Productivity Commission, and the Australian Treasury's Working Future white paper.

Higher risk:

• Administrative and clerical roles — data entry, scheduling, document processing
• Customer service — chatbots and AI agents are already handling tier-1 support
• Basic accounting and bookkeeping — automated reconciliation, BAS, payroll
• Retail — self-checkout, automated inventory, AI-driven merchandising
• Legal research and paralegal work — AI can review contracts and case law faster than humans
• Financial analysis and reporting — pattern recognition across datasets
• Content writing and marketing — LLMs can produce first drafts at scale

Lower risk:

• Trades — electricians, plumbers, builders (physical dexterity + site judgment)
• Healthcare — nurses, paramedics, physiotherapists (hands-on care)
• Emergency services — police, firefighters, ambos
• Social work and counselling — empathy-heavy, relationship-driven
• Childcare and aged care — physical presence and trust required
• Skilled construction — site-specific, variable, hard to automate

The common thread: if your job is mostly sitting at a screen processing information, AI can likely do a large portion of it. If your job requires being physically present, making judgment calls in unpredictable environments, or building trust with people, you're much safer.

The Fair Work Act 2009 doesn't mention "artificial intelligence" by name, but it absolutely covers the situation where technology replaces your role. Here's what matters.

Redundancy is redundancy regardless of the reason. If your employer automates your role using AI, that's a genuine redundancy under s.389 of the Fair Work Act. You're entitled to:

• Redundancy pay based on your years of service (1 year = 4 weeks pay, up to 16 weeks at 10+ years)
• Notice period (1-5 weeks depending on tenure and age)
• Payment of accrued leave

Use our redundancy pay calculator to see what you'd be owed.

Your employer must consult you first. Most modern awards and enterprise agreements contain consultation clauses about major workplace change, and introducing AI that eliminates roles qualifies. Under the model consultation clause (which covers millions of workers), your employer must:

• Notify you as soon as a decision is made to introduce AI that affects your role
• Discuss the likely effects on you and measures to avoid or minimise the impact
• Give you a genuine opportunity to influence the decision
• Consider your ideas about alternative arrangements

If they skip this process, the redundancy may not be "genuine" — and that opens the door to an unfair dismissal claim.

You can't be sacked for raising concerns about AI. If you ask questions about how AI will affect your job, raise safety concerns, or involve your union, you're protected under the general protections provisions (Part 3-1 of the Fair Work Act). Any adverse action — dismissal, demotion, reduced hours — taken because you raised those concerns is unlawful. Penalties: up to $18,780 per contravention for an individual and $93,900 for a company.

In early 2026, New South Wales became the first Australian state to pass legislation specifically addressing AI in the workplace. The law requires employers to assess the safety risks of AI systems used in work and to consult workers before deploying AI that materially changes their role.

Meanwhile, the Fair Work Commission has started requiring all applicants before it to disclose whether they used AI to prepare their submissions and to confirm they've checked the output for accuracy. This matters because it signals the FWC takes AI seriously — and that AI-generated unfair dismissal applications full of hallucinated case law won't fly.

The federal government is also consulting on broader AI regulation, though legislation is still a way off. For now, the Fair Work Act's existing provisions around redundancy, consultation, and general protections do most of the heavy lifting.

Whether or not AI is currently threatening your specific role, the time to prepare is now — not after you get the tap on the shoulder.

1. Understand your award and EA. Check whether your modern award or enterprise agreement has a consultation clause about major workplace change. Most do. If your employer starts talking about "AI transformation" or "digital uplift," that clause kicks in.

2. Know your redundancy entitlements. Use our redundancy calculator and notice period calculator to know what you'd be owed if the worst happened. Small businesses (under 15 employees) don't have to pay redundancy under the NES, but larger employers do.

3. Document everything. If your employer is piloting AI tools, keep notes. Dates, what was said in meetings, who was consulted. If it ever goes wrong, contemporaneous notes are your best evidence.

4. Upskill strategically. The jobs most resilient to AI are the ones that combine technical knowledge with judgment, relationships, and physical presence. If you can use AI tools as part of your job rather than being replaced by them, you're in a much stronger position.

5. Talk to your union. If you're a member, your union should already be running campaigns on AI and automation. If you're not a member, this is exactly the kind of issue that makes union membership worthwhile — collective bargaining over AI deployment is likely to be one of the defining workplace issues of the next decade.

AI is not coming for everyone's job, but it is reshaping the labour market faster than any technology shift in living memory. The Australian workers most at risk are those in information-processing roles earning above-average salaries — exactly the people who often assume their jobs are safe.

The good news: Australian workplace law is already equipped to handle AI-driven redundancies. The Fair Work Act's redundancy, consultation, and general protections provisions all apply regardless of whether the decision to cut your role was made by a human or prompted by an algorithm. You have rights. Know them.

Use our take-home pay calculator to check you're being paid correctly right now, and our redundancy calculator to understand what you'd be owed if your role is made redundant.