UK AI minister calls for contingency plan against potential job losses

IPPR estimates worst-case AI disruption could affect 8 million UK jobs

Kanishka Narayan, the UK’s AI minister, told a fringe meeting at the Labour Party conference that the government must “take seriously the possibility of an unprecedented impact on the jobs market” caused by artificial intelligence, and said developing a contingency plan for worst-case scenarios was one of his priorities.

Narayan said there was no evidence so far of an overall reduction in jobs attributable to AI. “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 told the meeting.

Carsten Jung of the IPPR think tank, speaking at the same event, said a worst-case scenario could see “about 8 million jobs being negatively affected by this.” Jung said the IPPR was working on a “pandemic preparedness” report on AI-driven disruption to the labour market.

Jung said AI adoption by industry had not been high so far and might not ultimately lead to massive job losses, but he argued it would still have a bigger impact on the labour market than the industrial revolution. He acknowledged that “stark scenarios” the IPPR had produced in 2024 were “to some extent” wrong, but said AI had evolved rapidly since then from doing “boring” tasks to “more high-level reasoning and creative tasks.”

“We are not preparing enough for something quite big that’s coming,” Jung told the gathering.

According to Jung, about 11% of UK jobs are “highly exposed” to being replaced by AI chatbots, “led by secretarial and administrative occupations.” With the rise of more sophisticated agentic AI, he said, that proportion “could rise to about 60% of tasks across the UK economy.”

Jung said the government needed to be ready to help retrain service-sector workers and to bring in measures to “slow down the transition slightly” to keep people in their jobs. That could involve redesigning tax structures to “make it a bit more attractive to hold on to workers than automating them,” he said.

He warned, however, that “a lot of the policies we might want to do in a really severe disruption scenario will cost a lot of money,” particularly as the UK is more of a service-based economy than other G7 nations. He also said women were “40% more exposed than men” to AI-driven job displacement because a higher proportion of women work in service jobs.

Narayan told the meeting that the impact of AI might have been underestimated because of the “silent adoption” of the technology by workers, which did not show up in industry surveys. UK firms had told him there was “no aggregate impact in the overall labour market today,” the AI minister said, but one tech firm had told him it had hired fewer people because tasks had been automated, “so the actual net impact might not be fully captured.”

The minister said he was determined that workers would have a voice in the transition to AI, and promised “much better transparency when AI and technology is adopted” so that any productivity gains could be measured. One of his top priorities, he added, was “thinking through what you would do in contingency” if job losses were as severe as some were predicting, with possible 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.

Separately, Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband used his conference speech to fire a warning at “tech titans” who he said could not be relied on to manage the safety risks posed by AI alone. He said that while some tech companies were “calling for us to act,” others “are saying we should leave it all to them.”

But, he argued, “the lesson of history is that we cannot leave it to corporations to put in place the guardrails to serve the public interest.” He added: “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.”

Miliband said that while the “technological progress” from AI was “inspiring,” the “threat it poses according to its own inventors is daunting,” and that the UK 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.”