The UK's AI minister, Kanishka Narayan, has said the government is building a contingency plan for a possible "unprecedented impact" of artificial intelligence on the jobs market — even though no evidence yet shows AI is hurting employment.

Speaking at a fringe meeting hosted by the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), Google and the Prospect union at the Labour Party conference in Liverpool, Narayan said he is focused on preparing for worst-case scenarios rather than waiting for the data to confirm them.

"If it's going to hit us in a big way, you are going to want to be as ahead of the curve as possible," he said, according to a BBC report from the event.

Narayan, appointed AI minister in July, also flagged a measurement problem that should concern HR and workforce planners: traditional industry surveys may be underestimating AI's employment impact because workers are adopting the technology bottom-up, often without documentation. One tech company told him it was hiring less because some tasks had been automated — a shift that official hiring data would not necessarily reveal. "The actual net impact might not be fully captured," he said.

The numbers behind the warning

Carsten Jung, interim associate director for economic policy and AI at IPPR, put a figure on the risk. "In a worst-case scenario you could have about eight million jobs being negatively affected by this," he said.

Jung said AI has evolved rapidly from performing menial tasks to "high-level reasoning." About 11% of UK jobs are currently "highly exposed" to replacement by AI, but he warned that agentic AI — systems that act autonomously — could extend that exposure to roughly 60% of tasks across the economy.

"We are not preparing enough for something quite big that's coming," he said.

IPPR is now working on what Jung called a "pandemic preparedness"-style report on AI disruption to the labour market.

What it means for employers

Jung argued the government must prepare to retrain affected workers and consider measures that could slow the pace of AI adoption, including tax structures designed to make employing people more attractive than deploying AI.

For HR leaders, the minister's comments raise practical questions. If bottom-up AI use is already shrinking hiring needs at some firms without showing up in surveys, internal workforce data may be the only reliable signal. HR functions that track task-level automation, shadow AI usage and role-by-role exposure will be better positioned than those relying on external labour market benchmarks.

The 11%-to-60% exposure range also frames the scenario-planning horizon. Even before any government intervention, the scale of potential disruption suggests reskilling pipelines, redeployment frameworks and hiring strategies may need stress-testing against far higher levels of task automation than current figures imply.

With IPPR's preparedness report in progress and the AI minister explicitly planning for worst-case outcomes, workforce disruption from AI looks set to stay on the UK policy agenda — and on HR's risk register — through the coming year.