The Delegation Divide: An Open Index of AI-Agent Delegability across Occupations and Countries

A growing body of literature measures the extent to which occupations are exposed to AI, yet existing measures capture where AI could perform tasks rather than whether workers have actually adopted it. We introduce a distinct tier of exposure, delegated exposure, which records whether a worker has committed a task to AI by embedding it into a structured workflow. We operationalize this concept through the Agentic Adoption Index (AAI), measuring how closely an occupation's tasks align with the agentic routines that practitioners have built and shared. Using semantic embeddings of roughly 888,000 agent skill specifications from public GitHub repositories, we compute their similarity to nearly 18,000 O*NET task statements and aggregate these scores to the occupational level. We present three main findings. First, the occupations where task delegation concentrates differ sharply from those identified as most vulnerable by pre-AI automation frameworks. Second, the AAI aligns more closely with measures of technical capability than with measures of current conversational LLM use. Third, for occupations requiring a bachelor's degree or less, the AAI increases alongside average wage levels; however, this relationship reverses for occupations requiring a master's degree or higher, where adoption declines among higher earners. These patterns replicate on an independently collected corpus of agent skills from the Manus Skills Marketplace. This lower adoption among highly educated, high-earning workers may reflect tasks that inherently resist advance specification or professional discretion over the pacing of workflow codification. Distinguishing these mechanisms will require longitudinal measurement.

Current benchmarks for occupational AI agents are scoped primarily by economic values, telling a replacement story. We introduce JobBench, which evaluates AI agents on the workflows that experts identify as high-priority for delegation, empowering humans based on their needs instead of replacing them with GDP value. JobBench covers 130 agentic tasks across 35 occupations. Each task is packaged as a workspace of heterogeneous reference files, requiring the agent to reason through the cluttered information streams of real professional work. Outputs are graded by a fact-anchored chain of rubrics, averaging 35.6 binary criteria per task. We evaluate 36 models; the strongest, Claude Opus~4.7 under Claude Code, reaches only 45.9 %. We hope JobBench shifts the community's target labour-market effect from replacement to enhancement: building agents that do what humans actually want delegated, not only what is most economically valuable.

This paper extends the Acemoglu-Restrepo task exposure framework to address the labor market effects of agentic artificial intelligence systems: autonomous AI agents capable of completing entire occupational workflows rather than discrete tasks. Unlike prior automation technologies that substitute for individual subtasks, agentic AI systems execute end-to-end workflows involving multi-step reasoning, tool invocation, and autonomous decision-making, substantially expanding occupational displacement risk beyond what existing task-level analyses capture. We introduce the Agentic Task Exposure (ATE) score, a composite measure computed algorithmically from O*NET task data using calibrated adoption parameters--not a regression estimate--incorporating AI capability scores, workflow coverage factors, and logistic adoption velocity. Applying the ATE framework across five major US technology regions (Seattle-Tacoma, San Francisco Bay Area, Austin, New York, and Boston) over a 2025-2030 horizon, we find that 93.2% of the 236 analyzed occupations across six information-intensive SOC groups (financial, legal, healthcare, healthcare support, sales, and administrative/clerical) cross the moderate-risk threshold (ATE >= 0.35) in Tier 1 regions by 2030, with credit analysts, judges, and sustainability specialists reaching ATE scores of 0.43-0.47. We simultaneously identify seventeen emerging occupational categories benefiting from reinstatement effects, concentrated in human-AI collaboration, AI governance, and domain-specific AI operations roles. Our findings carry implications for workforce transition policy, regional economic planning, and the temporal dynamics of labor market adjustment