[Provided by Boston Dynamics]
[Provided by Boston Dynamics]

The spread of artificial intelligence has yet to produce a clear decline in total employment or wages at the company level, but a restructuring of the labor market — centered on young and early-career workers — is already underway, researchers said Thursday.

The government said it would move quickly to support youth employment, strengthen the social safety net and develop talent for emerging industries to minimize the employment shock from the AI transition.

The assessments came at a forum titled "The Future of Work: A New Labor Market Coexisting with AI," jointly hosted by the Ministry of Finance and Economy and the Korea Development Institute at the Korea Federation of Banks building in Seoul on Thursday. Han Yo-sep, a KDI research fellow, presented on "The Labor Market in the AI Era: Assessment and Outlook."

Han said his analysis of firms that have adopted AI found no statistically significant decline in employment or wages at the company level so far.

However, he said AI is affecting the labor market less by replacing existing jobs outright and more by restructuring the tasks within them. Young workers and those early in their careers are most likely to feel the effects first, he added. Policies that create new job functions and facilitate movement between roles will be central to navigating the AI-era labor market, he said.

Han said that even as AI adoption expands, productivity gains could sustain overall labor demand across the economy — but in a rigid labor market, young workers could bear a disproportionate burden through reduced new hiring or difficult job transitions. Signs of declining youth employment are already emerging in the United States in occupations with high AI exposure, and similar shifts in South Korea deserve close attention, he added.

Jang Ji-yeon, a senior research fellow at the Korea Labor Institute, said in a subsequent presentation that the employment impact of AI will depend less on the technology itself than on how institutions respond to it. She compared younger workers — the first to experience AI-driven change — to "canaries in a coal mine," and called for an institutional response encompassing distribution, governance and skills development.

Lee Hyeong-il, first vice minister of the Ministry of Finance and Economy, said AI "is rapidly evolving beyond automating repetitive human tasks into an era of agentic AI that sets its own goals and coordinates work on its own." The government "will pursue talent development aligned with shifting labor market demand and strengthen the employment safety net, so that the AI transition becomes an opportunity rather than a crisis," he added.

Kwon Chang-jun, vice minister of the Ministry of Employment and Labor, said the country must move beyond "the simple quantitative debate over how many jobs AI will replace" and instead confront "the qualitative and structural question of whose jobs are changing, how they are changing, and how we should share the gains from that transition."

Meanwhile, the government also announced its Basic Plan for Employment Stability in Industrial Transition on Thursday, designed to address changes brought by AI and carbon neutrality.

The Ministry of Employment and Labor said it plans to build a Korean AI Occupational Exposure Index, a Korean Canary Dashboard and an Industrial Transition Job Map to detect employment shocks early and strengthen vocational training and job-transition support.


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