White-collar, corporate jobs could be in the firing line as artificial intelligence proves quicker at tasks requiring data-heavy tech skills
3-MIN READ3-MINMia NurmamatPublished: 9:00am, 4 Sep 2026For four years, Beijing-based Clare Zhang worked as a research analyst at a corporate advisory firm, helping companies assess technologies and competitors for projects they planned to list – until late last year, when she was told that artificial intelligence had reduced the number of analysts the company needed and could afford.Her job involved combing through company filings and public records to produce market and competitor studies that sometimes ran to 500 pages. But AI could increasingly collect and organise the information, analyse data and generate charts in a fraction of the time.
The pressure soon spread beyond individual jobs. Zhang recently learned that her former boss was also struggling with a declining number of clients, as they increasingly brought research in-house with AI, though her team had warned clients that AI could invent sources and produce convincing but unreliable findings.
“They would rather trust AI because our reports were considered too expensive,” Zhang said.
