Minister Warns Government Must Prepare for AI's "Unprecedented" Impact on Jobs

The government must "take seriously the possibility of an unprecedented impact on the jobs market" caused by artificial intelligence, a UK minister has said, as a leading think tank warned that millions of British workers could be affected and the foreign secretary accused technology companies of failing to manage the risks.

Kanishka Narayan, the AI minister, told a fringe meeting at the Labour Party conference that there was no evidence so far of an overall reduction in jobs, but that one of his priorities was to have a contingency plan ready for worst-case scenarios. "If it's going to hit us in a big way, you are going to want to be as ahead of the curve as possible," he said.

Carsten Jung, of the Institute for Public Policy Research, told the same meeting that "in a worst case scenario you could have about 8 million jobs being negatively affected by this". The think tank, he said, was preparing a "pandemic preparedness" report on AI labour market disruption. He conceded that "stark scenarios" the IPPR produced in 2024 were "to some extent" wrong, but argued that the technology had evolved rapidly since then from performing "boring" tasks to undertaking "more high-level reasoning and creative tasks".

"We are not preparing enough for something quite big that's coming," Jung warned. According to his analysis, about 11% of UK jobs are "highly exposed" to replacement by AI chatbots, "led by secretarial and administrative occupations". With the rise of more sophisticated agentic AI, he argued, that proportion "could rise to about 60% of tasks across the UK economy". The government, he said, needed to be ready to help retrain service sector workers, but also to introduce measures to "slow down the transition slightly" and keep people in employment. That could involve redesigning tax structures to "make it a bit more attractive to hold on to workers than automating them".

He cautioned, however, that "a lot of the policies we might want to do in a really severe disruption scenario will cost a lot of money" — a particular concern for Britain, which is more service-based than other G7 economies. Women, he added, were "40% more exposed than men" to the threat because a higher proportion work in service roles.

Narayan suggested the impact of AI may have been underestimated because of the "silent adoption" of the technology by workers, which does not appear in industry surveys. UK firms had reported "no aggregate impact in the overall labour market today", he said, but one technology company had told him it had hired fewer people because tasks had been automated, meaning "the actual net impact might not be fully captured". The minister said he was determined that workers would have a voice in the transition, promising "much better transparency when AI and technology is adopted" so that productivity gains could be measured. One of his top priorities, he added, was "thinking through what you would do in contingency" if job losses proved as severe as some predict, which could involve changes to "labour market policy" and "even where we might go on some aspects of regulation".

Mike Clancy, general secretary of the Prospect trade union, welcomed the government's commitment to giving workers more of a say but warned against "creating the conditions in which working people become victims" of AI.

Ed Miliband, the foreign secretary, used his own conference speech to fire a warning shot at "tech titans" he said could not be relied upon to manage AI safety alone. While some technology companies were "calling for us to act", others "are saying we should leave it all to them", he said. "The lesson of history is that we cannot leave it to corporations to put in place the guardrails to serve the public interest," Miliband argued. "It is neither their purpose nor their motive; theirs is to maximise profits. We cannot and will not allow that to come at the expense of our children or indeed humanity."

He described the "technological progress" from AI as "inspiring" but the "threat it poses according to its own inventors" as "daunting". Britain, he said, would confront those "urgent risks", including by using its G20 presidency next year to "lead the efforts to manage AI so we keep our country and our world safe".