The Bank of Korea published an issue note on 18 August reporting that net youth employment in Korea fell by 285,000 between June 2022 and June 2026, and that 268,000 of that fall, 94% of it, sat in sectors the central bank classifies as highly exposed to artificial intelligence (AI).1 Information services fell 31.4%, publishing 27.4%, and computer programming and systems integration 16.6%.
The central bank worked from National Pension Service enrolment records rather than from a survey. It watched people enter and leave insured jobs instead of asking them what they did for a living. Almost every earlier measurement on this beat has either scored how much of a job a model could in principle perform, or counted what employers chose to announce: one public tracker had logged 267 redundancy events and 185,894 affected workers by mid-June, with 56% of them citing AI. A pension register answers a narrower question and answers it precisely, because payroll enrolment is a legal fact rather than a self-description.
Employment among Korean workers in their fifties rose by 230,000 across the same four years, and 173,000 of that gain landed in the same exposed sectors. Young workers vanish where the over-fifties accumulate, inside one set of industries, over one window. Graduate unemployment in Korea has averaged 7.0% since November 2022 against 5.4% among workers holding sub-degree qualifications, which puts the burden on the people the career ladder is meant to admit rather than on those already standing on it.
Two limits travel with the finding. The note's own authors decline to blame AI alone and point to Korea's demographic decline, and a sectoral classification cannot separate substitution by software from the contraction in information services and publishing that hit most rich economies after 2022 for reasons including interest rates and the end of the pandemic hiring bubble. The exact note could not be retrieved from the central bank's own portal, so the figures here rest on outlets that read it and quote its method. What survives both caveats is the shape: a register can say who left insured work and from where, even when it cannot say why.
