Will AI replace Economists?

Many of your tasks are within reach of AI. The role will change, so it pays to act now.

Task exposure to today's AI

51/100

High exposure

This is the occupation's typical task mix. Your own score can be up to 30 points higher or lower depending on how you work: routine share, people contact, judgment and how much you already use AI.

Get your personal score

Will AI replace Economists?

Not entirely. Today's AI tools can take on about 51% of the typical work in this occupation, mostly: conduct research on economic issues, and disseminate research findings through technical reports or scientific articles in journals. The parts that stay human include: Compile, analyze, and report data to explain economic phenomena and forecast market trends, applying mathematical models and statistical techniques.; Study economic and statistical data in area of specialization, such as finance, labor, or agriculture.; Provide advice and consultation on economic relationships to businesses, public and private agencies, and other employers..

People who learn to use AI for the automatable parts keep the edge. The 3-phase plan below shows where to start.

Which tasks AI can take on

The largest tasks in this occupation, their share of the working week, and how much of each today's AI tools can do.

TaskAutomatable

Conduct research on economic issues, and disseminate research findings through technical reports or scientific articles in journals. 70%

Study economic and statistical data in area of specialization, such as finance, labor, or agriculture.AI already used 62%

Formulate recommendations, policies, or plans to solve economic problems or to interpret markets. 60%

Study the socioeconomic impacts of new public policies, such as proposed legislation, taxes, services, and regulations. 55%

Compile, analyze, and report data to explain economic phenomena and forecast market trends, applying mathematical models and statistical techniques.AI already used 42%

Provide advice and consultation on economic relationships to businesses, public and private agencies, and other employers.AI already used 42%

+ 8 more tasks (25% of the week) in the full test.

Your human edge

Compile, analyze, and report data to explain economic phenomena and forecast market trends, applying mathematical models and statistical techniques.
Study economic and statistical data in area of specialization, such as finance, labor, or agriculture.
Provide advice and consultation on economic relationships to businesses, public and private agencies, and other employers.

AI tools to try

ChatGPT / Claude for literature and writingAI research tools (e.g. Elicit, Consensus, Semantic Scholar)Copilot for data analysis code (Python, R)

Related roles

A 3-phase AI learning plan

Phase 1

Faster literature and writing

Literature search and summaries with AI, always checked against the papers.
Drafts of methods, reports and grant text.
Reference management and formatting.

Project

Use AI to summarise 30 papers on one economic question into an annotated literature review, verify every claim and citation against the source, and log hours saved versus your usual pace.

Phase 2

AI for data analysis

Analysis code in Python or R written with AI help.
Visualisation and statistics explained step by step.
Reproducibility: version code and prompts.

Project

Rebuild one past forecasting or panel-regression analysis as an AI-assisted, version-controlled R or Python script with saved prompts, and compare runtime and results to the original.

Phase 3

AI as a research method

Classification, extraction or modelling with AI on your data.
Validate against human labels or ground truth.
Ethics, data protection and disclosure of AI use.

Project

Use an LLM to classify 500 firm filings or job postings into economic categories, validate against 100 hand-coded labels, and report accuracy plus an AI-use disclosure note.

Take the free 11-question test