Real AI Job Impact Data Shows 5-8% Coverage, Not the 50-80% Replacement Hype

Reality Check: How much has AI taken over for each job so far

I just spent the weekend diving into Derek Wang's incredible Reverse-Karpathy Dashboard, and the numbers tell a completely different story than the AI apocalypse headlines.

Derek scraped real data from 830 occupations and mapped actual Claude usage against Bureau of Labor Statistics projections. The result? A dashboard showing what AI is ACTUALLY doing to jobs right now, not what an LLM thinks might happen.

Here's what jumped out at me:

Effective AI coverage is still single digits for most jobs when you factor in success rates. We're talking 5-8%, not the 50-80% replacement rates floating around LinkedIn.

57% of AI usage is augmentation, not replacement. People are getting faster at their jobs, not getting fired from them.

AI deployment failure rates in physical industries hit 25-40%. Turns out robots breaking down is expensive, and humans are still cheaper than fixing them.

The biggest barrier isn't capability - it's that organizations move like molasses, regulation exists, and implementation is harder than demos make it look.

After helping dozens of companies actually deploy AI over the past two years, this matches what I see in the field. The gap between "AI can do this" and "AI reliably does this at scale in your messy organization" is massive.

The companies winning aren't replacing humans wholesale. They're finding the 3-4 specific tasks where AI creates genuine leverage, then building around that.

Human judgment isn't going away ..yet ;)

See the data for yourself here: https://www.arewecooked.now/

What's your experience been? Are you seeing AI replace jobs in your industry or just making people faster at what they already do?