On 21st March 2026, a research team headed by Professor Thomas Malone at MIT's Center for Collective Intelligence released a report - Where can AI be used? Insights from a deep ontology of work activities. - Taking a bottom-up approach to the relationship of work, and its viability to be processed by AI or Robotics, the paper analyses tasks, and their propensity to realistically attract automation as a replacement to human executed work. Instead of analyzing jobs at the occupation level, the authors break work into nearly 40,000 detailed activities and map real-world AI usage onto them using data from 13.275 AI software applications and 20.8 million robots worldwide, developing a comprehensive framework for understanding where AI can realistically be applied across human work activities.
The MaxAITM Daily Report from WinMax, will dissect and inspect this highly scientific, and pragmatic report in a series of blogposts starting this week. As a Tech Staffing & Consulting Company located in the Bay Area over the past 20 years, we appreciate this timely report, which in place of alarmist headlines-from-an-headless-chicken, and the weak-tea-analysis we commonly hear online like "Elon Says These 5 roles Will be Non-existent in 5 years" or "Satya Says Those Roles Most in Danger of...", categorically lays out a realistic deep-dive into the nature of work, not analyzing jobs at an occupation level, but breaking it down into nearly 40,000 detailed activities. The report then builds it back up, mapping real-world AI usage onto these activities. We can also extrapolate from it, the crucial distinctions between B2C AI and B2B AI. Currently, most understanding of the AI capabilities, and its utilities; is homogeneous, with no distinction made between vague prompts about the disposition of cholic cats vs a series of algorithmic prompts that could lead to a hedge-fund grade recommendation report. A single Google Search of AI generated art or images is enough to assume that human beings are largely untalented, and no amount of AI support can bring sublimity or meaning to an artwork unless the prompter has aesthetics and design sensibilities. It just works to the advantage of the industry to club the stats, so it looks like a torrent of generic disruption, instead of the actuality which is a siloed usage across general and business.
Please tune into The MaxAITM Daily Report over the next couple of weeks as we deep-dive into the MIT Report, and see how they map to skills and staffing management in todays business space. Please read this post further for the highlights and major findings of the report. You can read the MIT Report in its entirety here
