Balam Labs Releases Agent Delegability Index: 35.2% of Global Task Time Partially Delegable to AI, but Full Takeover Accounts for Only 2.5%
Agent Delegability Index: How much of the work can AI agents take over?
Balam Labs has released the Agent Delegability Index (ADI v2026.1), estimating that 35.2% of task time across global employment can be at least partially delegated to AI agents, while only 2.5% can be fully taken over autonomously. Covering 18,796 specific tasks across 433 occupations in 146 countries, the study found that full delegation is most likely to occur in short tasks averaging around 12 minutes. Managerial and clerical roles showed the highest delegability, whereas manual labor ranked the lowest. The related dataset, report, and MCP tools have been open-sourced.
This study quantifies the share of real-world occupational tasks that agents can take over, highlighting that full automation accounts for only a tiny fraction concentrated in short tasks, which helps benchmark the practical boundaries of real-world adoption.
Source:Hacker News · AI · balamlabs.org