The October 29, 2025 MIT Iceberg Index headline finding is that visible AI adoption in tech accounts for only 2.2% of wage value, while “below the waterline” cognitive work across offices in industries like finance, and professional services pushes technical exposure to 11.7% in the US. For big organizations, this is less of a sci-fi speculation and more of a planning KPI. If 10–15% of your wage bill is doing skills that tools can already replicate, your real risk is being out-executed by peers that quietly turn that into lower operating costs and faster cycle times.
Delving into the Details
Project Iceberg is a digital twin of the U.S. labor market: 151 million workers, 923 occupations, 32,000 skills and 13,000 AI tools, simulated on the Frontier supercomputer using MIT’s Large Population Models. It computes an Iceberg Index, which is the share …