Frontier technology adopters and the aggregate decline of routine jobs

Abstract

We provide micro-founded evidence on how establishment-level adoption of frontier technologies shapes the economy-wide occupational employment structure. Linking survey data on technology adoption between 2011 and 2016 by 1660 German incumbent establishments to administrative worker records, we find that establishments adopting frontier technologies such as AI or smart factories contributed disproportionately to the overall decline in routine jobs. Crucially, these overall effects do not stem from average within-establishment adjustments but from a subset of large and less routine-intensive adopters. Our findings highlight that frontier technology adoption is not routine-replacing per se: establishment size and an initially non-routine-intensive workforce are key conditions for de-routinization to occur.