Skills

 In January 2026, Anthropic published a finding that complicates almost every clean prediction about AI and jobs. Looking across its accumulated Claude usage data, the company found that 49% of occupations showed AI use in at least a quarter of their tasks. That sounds dramatic. Then the researchers adjusted for how often workers actually perform those tasks, how long the tasks take, and whether Claude succeeds at them. The picture changed. Some occupations, including teaching and software development, looked less affected after that adjustment than their raw task counts suggested. Others, such as data-entry work, looked more exposed. That difference matters more than another prediction about which professions will disappear. A job is not a title. It is a collection of things somebody has to notice, produce, check, explain, decide, coordinate and eventually take responsibility for. AI does not have to replace all of those things to change the job. It only has to make some of them m...