Global Automation Atlas

Abstract

Automation can displace or complement labour, but this need not be constant across economies. Existing exposure measures typically assign fixed scores to tasks or occupations and capture cross-country variation through employment structure. We posit that exposure to automation depends jointly on task content and country-level conditions. We use a large language model to classify 18,797 work tasks in 124 economies by exposure, labour margin, technology channel and artificial-intelligence materiality. Country conditioning changes the classification of the same task and the occupation exposure rankings, especially in lower-income economies. Country-conditioned scores improve out-of-country predictions of firms' production-technology use and AI adoption; physical-execution exposure tracks industrial-robot use and density, while Atlas scores align with observed work-related ChatGPT and Claude use across activities and countries. The share of tasks exposed to automation ranges from 3.3% to 61.6% across countries. It rises with income but varies considerably within income groups. Lower-income economies are more concentrated in rule-based and labour-substituting forms of automation, whereas physical execution, planning and inference channels, together with labour-augmenting uses of artificial intelligence, become more prominent with development. Combined with employment data, we find that women are disproportionately employed in occupations with substitution-facing exposure. Across countries, higher informality is associated with a smaller exposed-task share but a larger substitution-only share among exposed tasks. Machine-learning hypothesis generation methods point to both economic and institutional drivers: automation is more feasible where firms have machinery, digital records and connected systems, but less so where tasks depend on local knowledge and trusted relationships.