IMF chief: AI 'slow-moving tsunami' threatens 40% of jobs

Georgieva's warning came at the IMF and World Bank annual meetings in Bangkok, joined by Singapore President Tharman Shanmugaratnam. Shanmugaratnam pointed to a decline in full-time employment for Singapore university graduates, from 79.4% in 2024 to 74.4% in 2025. He argued that governments should treat the issue as a long-term structural challenge, citing the responses to the 2008 financial crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic as possible models. Without early intervention, he warned, graduates could end up competing with the next year's cohort, losing skills and trust in the future.

The debate is not settled among technology leaders. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said he expected more impact on entry-level white-collar jobs by now and is 'delighted' to be wrong. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei offered a nuanced view, suggesting that if 90% of a job is automated, the remaining 10% could expand to become the whole role and multiply productivity. President Donald Trump has taken an optimistic stance, calling AI a 'tremendous job producer' and saying there will be so many jobs that robots will be needed to fill them. Meanwhile, protests by students in France over school facilities and education funding reflect broader anxiety about the future of work.