By 2035, most office jobs will involve working with an AI tool, and pay will depend more on judgement than on speed

Prediction: by 2035, a majority of office-based jobs in wealthy economies will include regular use of AI tools for drafting, analysis or routine tasks, and the difference in pay between workers will depend more on judgement, such as deciding what to do, checking the output and dealing with people, than on speed at routine tasks.

Reasoning: technology has repeatedly changed which tasks people do rather than eliminating work entirely, though it has also displaced some jobs and caused hardship for the people affected, a pattern sometimes called technological unemployment. Tasks that can be specified and checked are the easiest to automate, which raises the relative value of the tasks that cannot.

Confidence: low to moderate, about 50 percent. Forecasts about technology and jobs have often been wrong in both directions.

What would prove us wrong: if routine-task skills still dominate pay differences in 2035, or if AI use in offices remains marginal.

How to check: compare job-task surveys and wage data in 2025 and 2035.