Deloitte has warned 2026 will be the “year of AI disruption” for Australian workers, with new jobs forecast to nearly halve within two years.
A major consultancy firm predicts 2026 will be the “year of AI disruption” in the Australian labour market as it released a list of 82 jobs facing the highest risk.
Deloitte last week identified roles containing high amounts of tasks that could be replicated by AI, which could potentially lead to less people being needed in the future.
Its reportEmployment Forecasts: The Year of AIalso predicted Australia’s jobs growth rate would almost halve between 2025 and 2027, due to wider economic conditions.
The firm’s Access Economics partner David Rumbens told news.com.au that although Australia had already seen cuts attributed to AI, the overall picture was not yet one of mass losses.
“We’ve seen some organisations announce job losses and attribute that, at least in part, to AI,” Mr Rumbens said.
“Then if you look at more broadly, what are the occupations that are most likely to be affected, and you look at their employment levels … you wouldn’t say that there’s been employment losses overall, even though there has really been in some organisations.
“So employment in those occupations as a whole is holding up and indeed continuing to grow.”
Deloitte's list of jobs it believes were at most risk of AI augmentation. Picture: Supplied
The roles are largely white collar jobs. Picture: Supplied
The list of 82 “AI disrupted occupations” included managers in human resources, engineering, hospitality and retail as well as librarians, graphic designers and medical imaging professionals.
It also identifies bank workers, law clerks, accountants, secretaries, logistics workers, telemarketers and other sales-related roles.
Deloitte’s forecasts put growth in the affected cohort at less than half of what would be expected in the absence of AI, Mr Rumbens said.
“So the group of occupations that might be most disrupted we’re expecting might have slower growth over the next five years than they would have had if there wasn’t this sort of rapid AI change,” he said.
“That cohort of AI disrupted occupations had employment grow by 1.9 per cent per annum over the last five years.
“If you look over the next five, in the absence of AI, we expected that trend to slow a little to 1.2 per cent per annum.
“But with AI happening at a rapid rate that might then slow to 0.5 per cent per annum.”
Major Australian tech firms Atlassian and WiseTech both announced AI-driven job cuts earlier in 2026, which would see thousands of roles vanish.
In the US,Bloombergreported last week that tech companies revealed more than 38,000 jobs would be eliminated during the month of May – taking the year’s total to 125,623 cuts.
Not ‘typical market behaviour’
In its report, Deloitte notes vacancies in AI-disrupted tech jobs had fallen by 17.8 per cent on average for the three years to June 2026, well above the 9.9 per cent mark for the wider labour market.
This suggested it was “not just a result of cyclical labour market behaviour”, the report said, adding it was “likely disproportionately falling on entry-level workers”.
Deloitte's Year of AI jobs report tracks online vacancies since the emergence of AI. Picture: Supplied
Clinton Free, a professor at the University of Sydney Business School, said Deloitte appeared “fairly optimistic” about the impact of AI and its report was consistent with other projections.
But he believed it was too early to tell how the fast-evolving technology would impact the jobs market, saying the world was at an “interesting juncture” in its trajectory.
“This reminds me at the start of Covid when everyone said the lockdown will take three months, this will take six months, it ending up taking much longer because we didn’t really understand it,” Prof Free said.
“I think we’re in a little bit of that now where we’ve gone through a big hype cycle where everyone’s going to lose their job and now no one is.
“I think the truth is AI is changing fast and there is going to be a fairly uncomfortable disruption. And if you talk to a bunch of people who are looking for jobs now they’ll tell you that [it] isn’t so easy out there at the moment.”
In an interview withThe Joe Walker Podcastthis week, Productivity Commission chair Danielle Wood was asked how the coming AI wave would play out in the labour market.
She said the issue was “more nuanced” than the doomsday predictions made by figures like Anthropic chief Dario Amodei that AI would eliminate 50 per cent of white collar jobs, saying those views were possibly a marker of people too deep in the tech bubble.
Ms Wood said a recent Jobs and Skills Australia report, which split jobs into tasks and analysed what could be automated, found 4 per cent of roles were highly at risk.
“Things like data entry you could imagine could possibly disappear,” she said.
“And from a policy perspective we have to look after those workers and transition them.
“You then have a bigger set of jobs, which was about 31 per cent … likely to be augmented.
“Really the challenge is how do you upskill people to be working with the AI.”
New Aussie jobs to halve
Mr Rumbens said productivity gains through AI could see a redistribution of jobs across the labour market, with growth in other areas like physical trades.
But forecasts included in Deloitte’s report state the overall number of new jobs added to the labour market would fall from 304,000 in the year to June 2025 to 192,500 at the end of this financial year.
In 2026-27, Deloitte predicts employment growth would drop again to 155,500 new roles.
Mr Rumbens said the economic conditions in Australia, which faces a “big” productivity and inflation issue, meant slower jobs growth would be part of the macro economic cycle.
“We look at vacancies data across those (AI-affected) occupations and there are some, particularly in the tech side, where vacancies are dropping,” he said.
“And so that’s an indicator that there might be softer employment demand going forward.
“We look over at like the US in particular and see a greater amount of labour market restructure going on there.
“And then we look at the level of investment particularly in data centres, and that suggests that if we’re then looking forward to the rest of 2026, (and) in the next couple of years, that we would expect some of the labour market restructure to become more significant over that time.”
Deloitte also identified 12 “AI-enhanced occupations” including chief executives, general managers, legislators, scientists, primary school teachers and psychologists.
Mr Rumbens said technology could be a big lever in solving Australia’s productivity issues but whether AI delivers on its promise “remains to be seen”.
