Three million people are employed by the travel (agent) industry worldwide. I am struggling to see how we don’t lose 80%+ of those jobs to AI Agents in 3 years (this is ofc just one example). This is going to be an extremely painful process for a lot of people.
I am struggling to see how we do lose 80%+ of these jobs within the next 3 years.
Operationalizing this, I would give you 4:1 that the fraction (or raw number, if you’d prefer) of employees occupied as travel agents is over 20% of today’s value, according to the Labor Force Statistics from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics Current Population Survey (BLS CPS) Characteristics of the Employed dataset.
For reference, here are the historical values for the BLS CPS series cpsaat11b (“Employed persons by detailed occupation and age”) since 2011 (which is the earliest year they have it available as a spreadsheet). If you want to play with the data yourself, I put it all in one place in google sheets here.
As of the 2023 survey, about 0.048% of surveyed employees, and 0.029% of surveyed people, were travel agents. As such, I would be willing to bet at 4:1 that when the 2027 data becomes available, at least 0.0096% of surveyed employees and at least 0.0058% of surveyed Americans report their occupation as “Travel Agent”.
Are you interested in taking the opposite side of this bet?
Edit: Fixed aritmetic error in the percentages in the offered bet
Three million people are employed by the travel (agent) industry worldwide. I am struggling to see how we don’t lose 80%+ of those jobs to AI Agents in 3 years (this is ofc just one example). This is going to be an extremely painful process for a lot of people.
I am struggling to see how we do lose 80%+ of these jobs within the next 3 years.
Operationalizing this, I would give you 4:1 that the fraction (or raw number, if you’d prefer) of employees occupied as travel agents is over 20% of today’s value, according to the Labor Force Statistics from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics Current Population Survey (BLS CPS) Characteristics of the Employed dataset.
For reference, here are the historical values for the BLS CPS series cpsaat11b (“Employed persons by detailed occupation and age”) since 2011 (which is the earliest year they have it available as a spreadsheet). If you want to play with the data yourself, I put it all in one place in google sheets here.
As of the 2023 survey, about 0.048% of surveyed employees, and 0.029% of surveyed people, were travel agents. As such, I would be willing to bet at 4:1 that when the 2027 data becomes available, at least 0.0096% of surveyed employees and at least 0.0058% of surveyed Americans report their occupation as “Travel Agent”.
Are you interested in taking the opposite side of this bet?
Edit: Fixed aritmetic error in the percentages in the offered bet