- A 2025 ILO policy brief estimates that nearly 80 million workers across ASEAN — roughly 23 percent of total employment — hold jobs with meaningful exposure to generative AI. Only about 11.7 million fall into the highest-exposure category, and two-thirds of the regional workforce shows no identified exposure. Employment in exposed occupations has continued to grow despite increasing AI contact.
- Thailand ranks at 20.6 percent exposure, near the regional middle, while Singapore leads at 42.2 percent. The ILO highlights a preparedness gap between how exposed workforces are and how ready institutions are to respond. Women face disproportionately high exposure due to concentration in clerical and professional roles, and informal workers remain largely outside the data.
A new policy brief from the International Labour Organization puts a hard number on a question that has hovered over Southeast Asian boardrooms and finance ministries for the past two years: how many jobs in the region actually sit in the path of generative AI. The answer, released this week, is nearly 80 million.
What the ILO found
According to the ILO’s 2025 estimates, 22.9 percent of total employment across ASEAN — close to 80 million workers — sits in occupations with more than a minimal degree of potential exposure to generative AI. The brief, titled “Generative AI and labour markets in ASEAN: Significant exposure, limited disruption, uneven preparedness,” is careful to separate exposure from displacement. Only 3.3 percent of the regional workforce, around 11.7 million people, falls into the “highest exposure” category, and roughly 67 percent of ASEAN employment shows no identified GenAI exposure at all.
The report’s own framing captures the tension: significant exposure, but limited disruption so far. Employment in the most exposed occupations has kept growing even as GenAI touches more of the workforce, and actual adoption remains concentrated in technology-heavy roles, with much slower uptake in office and administrative jobs despite their higher exposure scores.
Where Thailand sits in the regional picture
Singapore tops the exposure ranking at 42.2 percent of total employment, a reflection of its finance- and tech-heavy economy. The Philippines follows at 28.1 percent, driven by its large IT and business process outsourcing sector, then Indonesia at 21.7 percent and Vietnam at 20.8 percent. Thailand comes in at 20.6 percent, near the middle of the pack and meaningfully below Singapore’s exposure level.
That positioning is worth reading alongside Thailand’s own AI trajectory. Microsoft recently reported that Thailand ranks second worldwide for AI adoption growth, with workplace AI adoption up 36.4 percent year-on-year. The two data points aren’t contradictory — fast-growing adoption from a low base is consistent with occupational exposure that hasn’t yet caught up to Singapore’s. The Thai government’s own 25 billion baht AI development programme allocates 6 billion baht specifically to building a skilled AI workforce, which suggests policymakers are already positioning for exposure to rise.
A gender gap inside the numbers
One of the more striking findings concerns who bears the exposure. Women are more than twice as likely as men to work in occupations with high GenAI exposure, a pattern the ILO links to their concentration in clerical, administrative, and professional roles. Young workers aged 15 to 24 show broadly similar exposure levels to older adults, suggesting this isn’t primarily a generational story.
The preparedness gap
Perhaps the most useful concept in the brief is what the ILO calls the preparedness gap — the distance between how exposed a country’s workforce is and how ready its institutions are to manage that exposure. Singapore is held up as the clearest example of high exposure matched with high preparedness, combining advanced digital infrastructure, strong talent availability, and a coordinated government strategy. The implicit question for the rest of ASEAN, Thailand included, is whether exposure will keep climbing faster than the institutional response.
That question sits close to ground Thailand has already been covering on other fronts. The country’s data centre and AI infrastructure buildout is running into its own talent shortage, with demand for skilled data-centre professionals outpacing supply. And in the informal economy, the ILO has separately noted that more than 16 percent of ASEAN youth were not in education, employment, or training in 2024 — a workforce segment the GenAI exposure figures don’t fully capture, since informal work accounts for a large share of employment in Thailand, Cambodia, and Indonesia.
The investment read
For now, the ILO’s message to policymakers and investors is one of urgency without alarm: the potential for labour market transformation is real, but the disruption itself hasn’t materialised yet. That gives ASEAN governments, Thailand’s among them, a window to build the reskilling and social protection systems the report calls for before adoption catches up to exposure. Whether that window stays open depends largely on how quickly GenAI moves from technology-sector adoption into the office and administrative roles where exposure is highest but uptake has so far lagged.
