Generative AI and the future of work and education
Generative AI
Fecha: enero 2026
Antonio Cabrales
SEFO, Spanish and International Economic & Financial Outlook, V. 15 N.º1 (January 2026)
Generative AI is already reshaping work, primarily by reorganizing tasks within occupations rather than eliminating jobs outright. Because jobs bundle tasks of varying difficulty, automation can either raise or lower expertise thresholds depending on which tasks are removed, producing outcomes in which wages and employment may move in opposite directions. Task-level evidence shows that roughly two-thirds of tasks removed since the late 1970s were routine, while abstract tasks account for most tasks added, pointing to increasingly divergent labour-market trajectories across AI-exposed occupations. Labour-market impacts will depend not only on technical capability but also on human agency and adoption choices. Firm-level evidence indicates seniority-biased technical change: junior employment declines following generative AI adoption—driven mainly by slower hiring—with reductions approaching 10% within two years. At the same time, AI offers opportunities in education by scaling expert feedback at low marginal cost, with randomized trials showing learning gains of around four percentage points. Economics education, in particular, is highly exposed to these changes but also well positioned to adapt, provided curricula shift toward AI literacy and complementary skills such as judgement, verification, communication, and applied project work. In Spain, where youth unemployment stood at 25.42% in Q3 2025, these dynamics make the early-career bottleneck especially salient, strengthening the case for expanding AI-enabled training capacity and redesigning school-to-work pathways, building on the demonstrated successes of dual vocational education.