In the near future, the image of “young people” wandering unemployed after graduation may no longer be a new phenomenon in Thailand's economic history.
Recently, the Thailand Development Research Institute (TDRI) issued a significant warning at its 2026 annual seminar with alarming figures: within a few years, approximately 2.2 million Thai workers face a high risk of job displacement due to artificial intelligence (AI).
This figure places Thailand as the third highest proportion of labor at high risk in the ASEAN region, following only Singapore and the Philippines.
Looking back, data from Kasikorn Research Center for the second quarter of 2026 align with this, showing unemployment rising sharply to 401,000 people, a 10% increase and the highest in nearly two years, predominantly among youth aged 20-24.
This group, known as first jobbers recently graduated from university, confronts rapidly closing job opportunities as employers adopt AI and automation to cut costs. Consequently, entry-level jobs—such as data entry, administrative tasks, accounting assistance, and even video editing and advertising copywriting—which once served as stepping stones for experience, are being eliminated.
Dr. Puttiphan Hiranyatrakul, a TDRI researcher, shared survey data on the online job market showing a dramatic shift: job postings requiring “AI skills” have quadrupled within just two years, expanding beyond IT and programming roles into accounting, marketing, and creative fields.
A critical and concerning insight from the TDRI report reveals that unlike previous waves where robots and machinery primarily replaced low-wage physical or repetitive jobs, the current AI wave targets office workers and professional roles.
This reflects a contraction of the middle-class job sector, as foundational roles that once built wealth for younger generations disappear, leaving only lower-income jobs unattractive to automation.
The major challenge falls on the government, which must not focus solely on encouraging businesses to adopt AI for profit or productivity gains but urgently develop new career pathways and fund extensive reskilling programs. These efforts should both reintegrate displaced workers and upgrade existing employees to become technology controllers rather than victims.
The 2.2 million lives hanging in uncertainty and the nearly half of young people currently adrift clearly reflect that the AI wave is not a distant future issue but a major storm eroding Thailand's economic structure right now.
Beyond livelihoods and careers, TDRI's report by Dr. Salilathorn Thongmeensuk highlights another aspect of technology—as a "turbocharger for criminals."
Today, technological crime has evolved into Cybercrime-as-a-Service, a comprehensive criminal business model offering rented programs, leaked data warehouses, mule accounts, and money laundering systems—all powered by AI. This enables call center gangs and criminals to produce highly convincing scams, deepfake voices and faces of close contacts, send phishing emails, and create thousands of fake websites within seconds—all at decreasing costs.
Although Thai banks have started using AI models to analyze and cut off mule accounts, offensive technology consistently outpaces defensive measures.
TDRI recommends, besides educating the public to "be aware" in an era where technology can create indistinguishable fakes, establishing a "shared responsibility" mechanism among financial institutions, telecom providers (mobile carriers), and social media platforms to share real-time data to block illicit funds before they leave the country.
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