Global Automation Atlas

Prashant Garg, Tommaso Crosta and Jasmin Baier

Papers from arXiv.org

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.

Date: 2026-05, Revised 2026-10
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