Microsoft’s 2025 rankings do not predict which jobs AI will eliminate. They measure how applicable generative-AI chatbots may be to tasks associated with different occupations. Interpreters and translators, historians, and passenger attendants ranked highest for chatbot applicability; dredge operators, bridge and lock tenders, and water treatment plant operators ranked among the lowest in a table reproduced by Windows Central. Neither end of the ranking says whether a particular worker will lose a job.
What Microsoft’s job rankings measure
Microsoft Research’s July 2025 paper, “Working with AI: Measuring the Applicability of Generative AI to Occupations”, analyzes 200,000 anonymized, privacy-scrubbed conversations with Bing Copilot. The researchers classified the kinds of activities users sought help with and the activities the AI performed, mapped those activities to occupational tasks, and combined the overlap with measures of task success and scope of impact to calculate an AI applicability score.
The study found that users commonly sought help with information gathering and writing, while Copilot commonly provided information and assistance, wrote, taught, and advised. That helps explain why knowledge-work occupations—such as computer and mathematical jobs, office and administrative support, and some sales roles—scored highly.
Microsoft later clarified that the conversations came from January through September 2024. The authors also noted that Copilot conversations may reflect people’s awareness of, access to, and comfort with the tool; it can be difficult to determine whether a conversation concerned work or leisure; and the study measured chatbot applicability, not other forms of AI. Those qualifications matter when interpreting what the rankings say about a real workplace.
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Which occupations ranked highest and lowest?
The ordered occupation tables and employment counts below are reproduced from Windows Central’s July 29, 2025 report, “Microsoft reveals a list of jobs about to be destroyed by AI.” The headline of that report overstates what the study establishes: these are higher- and lower-applicability rankings, not a list of jobs forecast to disappear. The employment figures are the U.S. occupation counts printed with that 2025 report; they are historical figures in that context, not current employment estimates.
Examples at the higher-applicability end
| Rank in reported list | Occupation | Employment count printed by Windows Central |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Interpreters and translators | 51,560 |
| 2 | Historians | 3,040 |
| 3 | Passenger attendants | 20,190 |
Other occupations near the top included service sales representatives, writers and authors, customer service representatives, telephone operators, journalists, technical writers, editors, and data scientists. The common thread is not that every task in each job can be handed to a chatbot. Rather, many tasks involve communicating, providing or finding information, writing, or advising—the kinds of activities observed in the Copilot conversations.
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Examples at the lower-applicability end
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| 3 | Water treatment plant and system operators | 120,710 |
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These examples tend to involve physical or in-person work that is not well represented by chatbot conversations. A lower score means less overlap under this study’s method; it does not show that an occupation is immune to other technologies, changing workflows, or future AI systems.
Why “applicability” is not a job-loss probability
Microsoft’s authors explicitly cautioned against reading the score as a measure of AI’s ability to perform an entire occupation. A job involves more than a list of tasks: occupational databases may not capture the context, judgment, domain expertise, interpersonal demands, or ethical considerations needed to do the work well. Even if a chatbot can assist with one task, that does not establish that an employer can or will replace a worker.
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There are several separate steps between task overlap and employment change:
- Applicability: a chatbot’s capabilities overlap with some tasks associated with an occupation.
- Adoption: a workplace chooses to use the tool, and workers have access and training.
- Task change: the tool changes how work is done, which may mean assistance or partial automation rather than eliminating a task.
- Employment effects: employers’ staffing decisions and broader changes in demand determine whether jobs are added, reduced, or redesigned.
Microsoft Research’s August 21, 2025 clarification states: “Our data do not indicate, nor did we suggest, that certain jobs will be replaced by AI.” Kiran Tomlinson, a Microsoft senior researcher, described the study to Windows Central as measuring overlap between chatbot capabilities and job tasks, “highlighting where AI might change how work is done, not take away or replace jobs.”
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What the rankings may mean for workers and personal finances
A ranking cannot tell an individual whether their position is safe. The more useful question is which parts of a person’s work are changing, and whether AI is being used to support those tasks, reduce their time, or shift responsibility elsewhere. For someone assessing career risk or planning a transition, the distinction matters: exposure to a tool is not the same thing as a forecast of income loss.
Consider the task mix rather than relying on an occupation’s rank. Work centered on drafting, information retrieval, routine customer communication, or summarizing may offer more opportunities for chatbot assistance. Work requiring physical presence, hands-on procedures, situational judgment, or sustained human interaction may have less direct overlap with a text chatbot. Many jobs combine both kinds of work, and the study’s occupation-level score cannot describe an individual employer’s workflow.
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Microsoft Research’s April 9, 2026 New Future of Work summary provides later context, but it is separate from the 2025 applicability ranking. The summary says large-scale empirical work had found no clear aggregate effects on unemployment, hours worked, or job openings, while pointing to possible uneven effects. It reports a 16% relative decline in employment for workers aged 22–25 in highly AI-exposed jobs compared with similar, less-exposed roles. That figure is about a separate body of labor-market evidence; it is not a result derived from the occupation ranking.
The 2026 summary also says job postings that mention AI skills are nearly twice as likely to emphasize analytical thinking, resilience, and digital literacy. This suggests that workplace change may involve shifting skill expectations as well as automation. It does not establish that a particular course, credential, or occupation will protect a worker’s earnings.
Quick Recap
How to use the list without mistaking it for a forecast
- Use a high rank as a prompt to identify tasks where chatbots might assist, not as a reason to assume a job will disappear.
- Look at the actual duties in a role; occupational categories can hide substantial differences between employers and workers.
- Separate chatbot capability from adoption, productivity gains, staffing choices, and the overall effect on employment.
- Treat the employment counts alongside the 2025 Windows Central tables as figures printed in that report, not as current job-market totals.
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