These 34 Jobs AI Will Never Take Over and Their Salary Insights

If you want a high-paying job that’s safe from being automated by AI, you’d better not be afraid of heights or electricity. 

That’s according to researchers at OpenAI, OpenResearch, and the University of Pennsylvania, who identified 34 occupations that AI could never do in a Science article published in 2024. Checking in a couple of years after the article was first drafted, the researchers have thus far been right: these are hands-on roles requiring your physical presence, manual labor, or involves work in highly unpredictable environments, leaving little for AI to automate.

What Careers Are AI-Proof?

The top-paying position was electrical power-line installers and repairers. The folks who maintain and repair power lines make a median annual salary of $92,560, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). The job may be safe from automation, but it is a risky way to make a living—it had the 10th-highest fatality rate of all occupations in 2023, according to BLS data, with 18.4 deaths for every 100,000 workers, more than five times the rate for all workers, 3.5.

Other relatively high-paying AI-proof jobs included athletes and pile-driver operators. Many, however, had relatively low wages, such as bartenders, cafeteria workers, and other manual laborers. For comparison, the median annual salary as of 2024 was $60,268, according to the BLS.

The Jobs That Aren’t

Some of the highest-paying white collar jobs in finance and software are the most exposed, the University of Pennsylvania researchers predicted in their paper. 

Jobs in securities, commodity contracts, other financial investments, and related activities (average annual wage of $109,710 in 2025), insurance carriers and related activities ($79,000); and data processing, hosting, and related services ($117,000) had the most exposure to AI, according to the researchers. 

Recent data supports that prediction: A 2025 Stanford study using ADP payroll records found that early-career workers in AI-exposed fields like software development and customer service have undergone a 13% relative decline in employment since late 2022, while major banks, including Goldman Sachs Group, Inc. (GS) and JPMorgan & Chase & Co. (JPM), have begun reducing junior analyst hiring as they deploy AI across their operations.

How Researchers Determined How AI Could Affect Different Jobs

To calculate the likely AI impact, the researchers, Tyna Eloundou, Sam Manning, Pamela Mishkin, and Daniel Rock, along with other AI experts, rated the individual tasks that each occupation required on how much time could be saved by using AI. The researchers automated some of their own jobs and asked an AI program to do the same, noting it came up with similar ratings as the humans. 

All told, 15% of tasks across all jobs could be done faster by AI with no decrease in quality, with that number jumping to somewhere between 47% and 56% if the AI were paired with specialized software and tooling for specific applications, the researchers calculated.

“These technologies can have pervasive impacts across a wide swath of occupations in the U.S.,” the researchers wrote. “As capabilities continue to evolve, the impact of LLMs on the economy will likely persist and increase.”