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Silent transformation in the Brazilian labor market accelerates salary disputes, redefines traditional roles, and widens inequalities between professionals exposed to automation and those who master applied artificial intelligence in business.
Generative artificial intelligence has already changed the way companies hire, compensate, and distribute tasks in Brazil.
The movement does not indicate an immediate disappearance of jobs en masse, but reinforces a deeper change: positions with standardized activities have lost value, while professionals capable of developing, integrating, and operating AI systems have begun to compete for the highest salary ranges in the market.
Impact of artificial intelligence on the Brazilian labor market
Data gathered by FGV IBRE shows that 29.8 million people, equivalent to 30% of the employed population, were exposed to generative AI in Brazil in the third quarter of 2025.
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Within this universe, the institution itself highlights a particularly vulnerable group: about 20% of the employed population combines high exposure with low complementarity to technology, a scenario associated with a higher risk of replacement and loss of income.
In practice, the most visible effect has not been the immediate disappearance of job titles, but the erosion of the value of certain roles.
Activities such as administrative support, production of standardized documents, information sorting, and simpler operational analyses have begun to be executed more quickly by software, which reduces the time required from the worker and pressures the minimum wage for these occupations.
FGV IBRE itself cites the risk of a decline in labor’s share of income when AI operates primarily as a substitution technology.
This redesign mainly affects office jobs with predictable tasks and high repetition.
The FGV IBRE study also shows that exposure to AI increases as the qualification required by the occupation rises: it reaches 42.7% among workers with a complete higher education, compared to 10.2% observed among people with no education or incomplete primary education.
At the same time, women and young people appear among the most exposed groups, which helps explain why the technological transition tends to produce unequal effects among sectors, professional profiles, and regions of the country.
Salaries rising for AI specialists in Brazil
While part of the market sees traditional roles losing traction, another is experiencing a race for scarcity.
The 2026 Salary Guide from Robert Half places the starting salary of artificial intelligence engineer between R$ 19,500 and R$ 27,100 in Brazil, a level far above the average for various traditional technical roles.
In the same vein, positions related to machine learning, data integration, and prompt engineering have become central in the competition for talent.
The appreciation is not limited to the fixed salary.
Research cited by Forbes Brazil indicates that 83% of companies are more willing to pay higher compensation for professionals with specialized AI skills, signaling that technology has ceased to be a peripheral differential and has begun to directly influence retention, promotion, and bonus policies in large companies.
Behind this shift is a simple change in business logic.
Previously, the company sought someone to perform tasks.
Now, in many areas, it looks for someone who can extract results from the system, review responses, integrate data, reduce errors, and adapt the tool to the business.
The value has shifted from raw operation to qualified supervision, process design, and the ability to transform AI into measurable productivity.
This is one of the reasons why the salary premium has concentrated on hybrid profiles, with technical mastery and applied vision.
Professions less threatened by automation
Not all jobs, however, have entered the same trajectory.
Roles that depend on physical presence, improvisation in real environments, fine motor skills, contextual judgment, and direct human interaction remain more protected.
The literature cited by FGV IBRE and recent analyses on occupations less threatened by AI point to greater resilience in areas such as construction, installation and repair, as well as some caregiving services.
Electricians, carpenters, plumbers, and maintenance technicians continue to be among the most frequent examples of this group.
In healthcare, resistance to automation appears in another form.
The first Nursing Demographics, released by the Ministry of Health and reported by sector agencies, indicated a growth of almost 44% in nursing job positions between 2017 and 2022, rising from about 1 million to 1.5 million links.
This data does not isolate the effect of AI, but reinforces that sectors based on in-person care, quick response, and ethical responsibility continue to require a strong human presence.
Education and some personalized services are moving in a similar direction.
Automated tools already summarize texts, create presentations, correct exercises, and organize routines, but they still do not fully replace pedagogical repertoire, conflict mediation, context reading, and real-time adaptation to unforeseen situations.
In other words, technology advances faster where the task is predictable and measurable; it moves more slowly when the work depends on presence, nuance, and relational responsibility.
Inequality and informality in the AI scenario
While accelerating productivity, AI amplifies an old risk in the national labor market: deepening inequalities between those who can adapt and those who remain on the margins of the transition.
FGV IBRE warns of the possibility of concentrating gains among a few workers highly complementary to technology, as well as increasing asymmetries between regions with more robust digital infrastructure and areas less prepared to absorb the change.
This scenario intersects with a market still strongly marked by informality.
According to IBGE, the rate stood at 37.5% in the quarter ending January 2026, equivalent to 38.5 million informal workers, while the annual rate for 2025 was 38.1%.
When digitalization reduces income in intermediate occupations and retraining does not keep pace, the trend is to increase the vulnerability of those who already navigate between precarious jobs, self-employment, and low social protection.
The most consistent recommendations today lean less towards alarmism and more towards adaptation.
FGV IBRE advocates for strengthening basic education, statistics, digital skills, programming, and transversal competencies, as well as social protection policies and rules for transparency, minimum explainability, and contestation of automated decisions in the workplace.
The discussion, therefore, is no longer limited to whether machines will replace people, but to defining which workers will have a real condition to work alongside them without losing income, autonomy, and bargaining power.
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