Robots will be able to fill 30% of job vacancies by 2030: Study

By 2030, service robots should be able to fill about 30 percent of job vacancies, depending on the sector. In logistics, service robots could fill over half of available jobs, consultancy firm PwC concluded in research into the role of robots in the Dutch labor market, Financieele Dagblad reports.

Service robots “help employees to lift more, sort faster, or get something from A to B faster,” PwC chief economist Jan Willem Velthuijsen said to FD. These include robotic arms in factories, AI-driven programs like ChatGPT, and medical robots.

AI will significantly improve these machines in the coming years, PwC expects. Robots will be able to teach themselves more, see their environment, and listen and talk better. That brings several applications within reach in service professions, where the use of robots is currently relatively limited. Think retail, healthcare, and catering.

But the most significant gains are still in companies that transport and store goods, Veldthuijsen said. Robots can more than halve the expected vacancies in this sector, filling some 65,000 job openings by 2030. In industrial production, robots could fill 46 percent of vacancies, in construction 36 percent, and in wholesale and retail 35 percent.

Robots' contribution will be relatively lower in healthcare and education service sectors already facing massive staff shortages. But since so many people work in these sectors, robots can still make a significant difference in absolute terms. In healthcare, service robots could fill 110,00 of the 520,000 expected vacancies and 17,000 of the 207,000 vacancies in education.

According to PwC, the Netherlands is lagging behind other European countries regarding using robots in the labor market. Only 2 percent of Dutch businesses used robots in 2020, 70 percent of the EU average. PwC saw no clear explanation for this - Netherlands residents are relatively well disposed towards robots, labor is relatively expensive, the Netherlands has enough capital available to invest in robotization, and many tech companies in the country work on this type of technology.

Velthuijzen thinks the problem is resistance in the workplace. Sectors where robots can make a big difference, like healthcare and education, often employ older workers, who are less open to labor-saving technology.