The world is only just beginning to feel AI’s impact on the job market, according to Kristalina Georgieva, head of the International Monetary Fund. The coming disruption, she said, is like a “slow-moving tsunami” and warned that young workers could be among those hit hardest.

“The people to worry about first and foremost are young people that are coming into the labor market,” Georgieva said at an event in conjunction with the IMF and World Bank annual meetings in Bangkok on Monday.

“Normally, they would get into these routine, repetitive jobs and then grow up the ranks. But if they’re gone, I don’t think any young person wants to be a barista in a coffee shop as their professional future.”

The IMF estimates that around 40% of jobs worldwide will be augmented, downgraded, or eliminated as AI advances.

Georgieva added the technology is already reshaping the labor market: Workers with AI-related skills are earning more, but that hasn’t translated into broad-based job growth. Meanwhile, lower-paying roles, including restaurant jobs and data center construction, are growing.

Middle-skilled workers whose jobs are highly exposed to automation risk being left behind, with advanced economies facing a particularly significant impact.

“Burst the myth that AI is shrinking demand for people,” Georgieva said. “What it is doing is shifting demand for people now. That may not be the case in the future.”

Singapore’s president warns Gen Z will ‘lose trust in the future’ if entry-level talent pipelines aren’t fixed

It’s not yet too late to build up the flood barriers. Governments, Georgieva said, need to rethink education for a world in which workers can no longer expect to learn one set of skills and rely on it throughout their careers.

One way to encourage this thinking is by focusing on the fiscal implications: Major labor market disruptions will lead to less spending, and consequently, less revenues generated by taxes—leaving governments in a tough financial spot, she added.

Singapore President Tharman Shanmugaratnam, who joined Georgieva onstage, acknowledged this reality.

“The first rung in employment, your first job upon graduation, is now seeing less demand,” he said. In Singapore, 74.4% of university graduates secured full-time positions in 2025, down from 79.4% in 2024, according to data reported by the Straits Times.

Shanmugaratnam argued that governments should treat the challenge as a long-term structural issue, rather than waiting for it to become a crisis. He pointed to the policy responses that followed the 2008 financial crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic as potential models for helping workers navigate a changing economy.

Without that foothold, he warned, there could be a domino effect of more graduates competing for fewer jobs.

“We can’t afford to lose that because if you lose that, you not only have that cohort of young people waiting a year and then competing with the next cohort the next year, you lose more than one year of skills,” Shanmugaratnam said. “You lose a whole set of intangible attributes, and you lose trust in the future.”

That erosion of trust is already spilling into the streets in France, where hundreds of thousands of students have taken part in protests over deteriorating school facilities and called for greater education funding.

From Sam Altman to Donald Trump, some leaders see a more optimistic future for AI jobs

While Georgieva and Shanmugaratnam are warning about AI’s potential to disrupt the labor market, other prominent figures have struck a more optimistic tone—or acknowledged that the technology’s impact has been slower to materialize than they expected.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, for example, has acknowledged that AI has yet to eliminate entry-level white-collar jobs at the pace he anticipated.

“I’m delighted to ⁠be wrong about this,” Altman said in an interview with the Commonwealth Bank of Australia CEO Matt Comyn in May. “I thought there would have been more impact on entry-level white-collar jobs being eliminated by now than ​has actually happened.”

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who previously warned that AI could eliminate 50% of white-collar jobs, has also offered a more nuanced view of how automation could reshape work.

“If you automate 90% of the job, then everyone does the 10% of the job,” Amodei said. “And the 10% expands to be 100% of what people do and 10 times their productivity.”

In terms of global leaders, President Donald Trump has remained optimistic that the technology—which he recently declared should instead be called “super intelligence”— will ultimately create more jobs than it destroys.

“I think AI is going to be a tremendous job producer,” Trump said to the New York Times in January. He added that there will be “so many jobs” that “we don’t have enough people to fill the jobs, and that’s where robots come in.”