“It’s about 18% of the active population,” underlines the general director of the IDQ, Emna Braham, in an interview. These workers are found mainly in the sales and service and manufacturing sectors, but also increasingly in office professions, administrative assistants or accounting auditors.”
The IDQ has identified 96 occupations vulnerable to automation and the adoption of artificial intelligence, in a study published Wednesday in collaboration with the Center for Future Skills.
Vulnerable occupations include cashiers, waiters, accounting auditors, manufacturing machine operators and livestock workers.
For these professionals, the options for reorientation towards another profession with a relatively comparable salary are limited. The number of workers at risk is, however, even higher, if we consider professionals who have better prospects for reorientation.
For example, translators see their profession threatened by major language models. However, the IDQ believes that their language skills give them the tools to redirect themselves towards teaching.
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The think tank therefore does not include translators and other professionals who can reorient themselves more easily, among the 810,000 vulnerable workers.
The CD Howe Institute estimated, for its part, that nearly a third of jobs in Quebec were at high risk of being automated, according to a study published in May 2022.
For its part, the IDQ wanted to focus its analysis on workers who would have more difficulty reclassifying. “We wanted to bring this nuance, to say to ourselves: ‘in terms of public policy, perhaps what is more important is to concentrate on these workers who are vulnerable and where the job market , ultimately, will not allow them to easily get back on track.”
The situation is more worrying for workers without qualifications. 27% of them are working or looking for work in a vulnerable profession.
University graduates are not completely spared, but they are in a better position. Only 8% of professions are in a vulnerable situation. This is particularly the case for accounting auditors.
The education, social and community services as well as the arts and culture sectors are largely spared from the technological upheavals to come.
“If certain tasks could be automated or replaced by artificial intelligence, not all of the tasks in these jobs can be,” notes Ms. Braham. We think about empathy or emotional intelligence, which ensures that these jobs are not as risky as others.”
Gradual changes
The launch of ChatGPT in November 2022 has created a sudden awareness effect for artificial intelligence. Many Internet users regularly use artificial intelligence for their work or daily tasks, whether to write an email or develop a recipe using ingredients they have in their kitchen.
The adoption of artificial intelligence should be much more gradual in businesses and governments.
“In many cases, it requires investment, it requires training, it requires having a strategic plan to integrate these technologies,” says Ms. Braham. So, it could be a lot slower than we imagine.”
Barely 12% of Quebec companies plan to use artificial intelligence over the next year, according to the IDQ.
Quebec is, however, at the head of the pack when comparing it with the other Canadian provinces, responds by Anthony Migneault, senior economist at the IDQ, during the same interview. “When we looked at Statistics Canada surveys, Quebec seems to be more among the leaders and we should be happy about that. But it also means that changes to the labor market will perhaps arrive sooner in Quebec.”
