What share of employers expect robots to transform their business?

58%, according to the WEF Future of Jobs Survey 2024, which places robots and autonomous systems second among nine technologies. AI and information processing leads at 86% and energy generation and storage follows at 41%.

Why does AI rank so far ahead of robots?

The survey does not say, so any explanation is inference. The straightforward reading is reach: software can touch processes in almost any business, while robots need a physical operation to automate. What the data supports is the gap itself, 28 points, not a reason for it.

Is 58% the share of companies that have deployed robots?

No. It is the share expecting robots and autonomous systems to transform their business by 2030. Actual installation is far more concentrated: the same report notes 80% of robot installations occur in just five countries.

Does the report say robots will create or destroy jobs?

Both, in the same document. Robots and autonomous systems are named among the primary drivers behind the fastest-growing jobs and among the primary drivers of decline in clerical roles. The expectation is redistribution rather than a single direction.

The report says global robot density is 162. Is that current?

Not any more. It was accurate when the report was published in January 2025. IFR has since restated the series after China's statistics bureau reissued its manufacturing employment data, and the current global average is 132 per 10,000.

Robotics adoption

What employers expect to reshape work: AI 86%, robots 58%

86% for AI, 58% for robots. Those are the shares of employers who expect each technology to transform their business by 2030, and robots come second out of nine technologies the survey asked about.

Second place is a stronger result than it sounds. The list runs from AI at the top down to satellites and space technologies at 9%, and robots sit closer to the leader than to the middle of the field. But the 28-point gap behind AI is the real signal: employers expect software to reshape more businesses than machines will, which is the opposite of how automation is usually pictured.

This page traces the technology ranking to the WEF survey that produced it, sets it beside the broader trend list where a non-technology answer actually finished first, and flags one figure inside the report that has since been overtaken.

Data covers Employer expectations of technology-driven business transformation over 2025 to 2030, WEF Future of Jobs Survey 2024 (published January 2025). Published 2026-08-16. Last reviewed 2026-08-16. Last updated 2026-08-16. Edited by Mike Ramsey / Reliable Media.

The figures and where they come from

Each figure is rated for how safely you can cite it today. Ratings judge current usability, not whether a number was ever correct.

Figure	What it is	Source	Citation Confidence	Notes
86%	Employers expecting AI to transform their business	[A]	High	AI and information processing technologies, first of the nine technologies the survey put to employers.
58%	Employers expecting robots to transform their business	[A]	High	Robots and autonomous systems, second of nine. The survey groups robots with autonomous systems, so this is broader than industrial robot arms alone.
41%	Employers expecting energy technologies to transform their business	[A]	High	Third of nine, and the last of the three the report singles out as standing apart from the rest of the list.
60%	Employers expecting broadening digital access to transform their business	[A]	High	The top answer on the report's separate list of macrotrends, which mixes technology with economic, demographic and green-transition forces. It outranks robots and sits below AI.
about 5-7% a year	Growth in robot expectations since 2020	[A]	Medium	The rate at which this expectation has climbed across survey editions. It describes movement in employer sentiment, not in robot installations.
80%	Share of robot installations in five countries	[A]	Medium	China, Japan, the United States, Korea and Germany. The report ties this to the survey, noting more than 60% of respondents in each of those five expect these technologies to be transformative, against 39% in Sub-Saharan Africa.
162 per 10,000 (2023)	Robot density the report cites	[A]	Low	Correct when the report went to press and overtaken since. IFR has restated the series: the 2024 figure is 132 on a revised basis, after China's National Bureau of Statistics reissued the manufacturing employment data the ratio divides by. Quote 132 for the current global average, not this.

Why the numbers disagree

Software beats machines in this survey, and that surprises people. Automation coverage tends to picture a robot arm, but employers put AI and information processing 28 points ahead of robots and autonomous systems. One plausible reason is reach: almost every business has processes software can touch, while robots need a physical operation to automate. The survey does not test that explanation, so treat it as the obvious reading rather than a finding.

The two lists in this report are easy to conflate. One ranks nine technologies, where AI leads at 86%. The other ranks broader macrotrends including economic and demographic forces, where broadening digital access leads at 60% and rising cost of living comes second. A figure lifted from one list and set against a figure from the other compares different questions, which is how robots at 58% ends up being described as beating a 50% trend it was never ranked against.

Robots appear on both sides of the jobs ledger in the same report. They are named among the primary drivers behind the fastest-growing jobs and, in the same document, among the primary drivers of decline in clerical roles. That is not a contradiction to be resolved but the actual shape of the expectation: the same technology adds work in some occupations and removes it in others.

This measures expectation, not deployment. A high percentage means many employers think a technology will change their business, not that any of them have installed anything. The report's own robot-installation figures are far more concentrated than the survey sentiment, with 80% of installations in five countries.

How to cite these figures

Cite the technology ranking with its list: AI and information processing 86%, robots and autonomous systems 58%, energy generation and storage 41%, from the WEF Future of Jobs Survey 2024. Naming the survey stops the figure being read as an adoption rate.

Say robots and autonomous systems, not robots. The category the 58% belongs to includes autonomous systems, so it is wider than industrial arms.

Keep the two rankings apart. Use 86% and 58% when comparing technologies; use 60% for broadening digital access only when discussing the broader macrotrend list.

Do not quote the report's 162 robot-density figure. IFR has since revised the series, and 132 is the current global average.

Where people go wrong

Reading 58% as the share of employers using robots. It is the share expecting robots and autonomous systems to transform their business by 2030, which is a forecast about intent.

Presenting robots as the leading transformative technology. They rank second, and AI leads by 28 points.

Mixing the technology list with the macrotrend list. Broadening digital access at 60% is not a technology competing with robots at 58%; the two figures answer different survey questions.

Repeating the 162 robot-density figure because a major report printed it. It was current in January 2025 and has been superseded by a restated series.

How we checked

The technology percentages on this page are quoted from the report's prose rather than read off its charts. The underlying figures appear in a bar chart whose labels and values separate when the PDF is extracted, so pairing them by position would have been guesswork. The report states each of the three headline pairings in a sentence, and those sentences are what the citation strings anchor to.

That distinction changed what this page could claim. Nine technologies are charted; only three are confirmed in words. We publish those three and do not assign percentages to the remaining six, even though the chart order strongly implies them.

The robot-density line is included precisely because it is stale. A reader is more likely to meet that number inside this widely-read report than in the IFR release it came from, so the page carries it with a Low rating and points at the revision rather than leaving a superseded figure unremarked.

Confidence splits by how much interpretation each number needs. The three prose-confirmed technology shares rate High. The sentiment growth rate and the installation concentration rate Medium, because both are single sentences summarising series published elsewhere. The density figure rates Low because it has been restated.

Full source list

Primary sources, with live links. Every figure above traces to one of these.

[A]World Economic ForumJanuary 2025
World Economic Forum, "Future of Jobs Report 2025"
https://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Future_of_Jobs_Report_2025.pdf

Common questions

What share of employers expect robots to transform their business?: 58%, according to the WEF Future of Jobs Survey 2024, which places robots and autonomous systems second among nine technologies. AI and information processing leads at 86% and energy generation and storage follows at 41%.
Why does AI rank so far ahead of robots?: The survey does not say, so any explanation is inference. The straightforward reading is reach: software can touch processes in almost any business, while robots need a physical operation to automate. What the data supports is the gap itself, 28 points, not a reason for it.
Is 58% the share of companies that have deployed robots?: No. It is the share expecting robots and autonomous systems to transform their business by 2030. Actual installation is far more concentrated: the same report notes 80% of robot installations occur in just five countries.
Does the report say robots will create or destroy jobs?: Both, in the same document. Robots and autonomous systems are named among the primary drivers behind the fastest-growing jobs and among the primary drivers of decline in clerical roles. The expectation is redistribution rather than a single direction.
The report says global robot density is 162. Is that current?: Not any more. It was accurate when the report was published in January 2025. IFR has since restated the series after China's statistics bureau reissued its manufacturing employment data, and the current global average is 132 per 10,000.

More data, traced to source

The jobs forecast almost nobody quotes in full: 170m up, 92m down
Employers surveyed by the World Economic Forum expect technology and four other forces to create 170 million jobs and destroy 92 million by 2030. The number that matters is the one in between, and it is the one that goes missing in the retelling.
Two-fifths of your skills go stale in five years, and that is an improvement
Employers expect 39% of a worker's existing skills to be transformed or outdated within five years. The figure is quoted as evidence that change is accelerating, but it has fallen from 44% and from a pandemic peak of 57%.
Robot density statistics and where they come from
The most-cited robot density figures are stale. Here are the current numbers, where each one comes from, and why the global average fell while automation kept rising.
Robot density: why IFR published both 177 and 132 for 2024
IFR put global robot density at 177 per 10,000 in its World Robotics 2025 foreword and at 132 in an April 2026 release. Both describe 2024. China's statistics bureau revised the manufacturing headcount in between, and almost the whole gap is that one change.
How many US firms actually use robots? Far fewer than you would think
The story is that everyone is automating. The US Census Bureau's own firm survey found only about 2% of US firms use robotics. A newer Census release puts it far higher. The gap is the whole story.