Of the economists surveyed, 15 agree that AI will increase labor productivity.
Other sectors that will benefit in the coming years from AI are health and education.
Sixteen of the world’s most influential economists have just written something that digital asset markets should read carefully. Artificial intelligence will transform finance before almost any other sector, and that opens a window that the bitcoin (BTC) and cryptocurrency ecosystem has not yet fully calculated.
The survey, published by The Wall Street Journal, brings together figures such as Daron Acemoglu, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2024, and Jason Furman, former president of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, among others.
He The result is a collective portrait of Where is the labor market going in the next five years?and its implications for decentralized finance are more direct than it seems at first glance.
Ajay Agrawal, a professor at the University of Toronto, was one of the most direct in pointing out that the biggest beneficiaries of AI will be the “densely informed” sectors. It placed finance on the same level as health and education, industries where expert prediction is scarce, cognitive bottlenecks are costly, and AI can operate as a capabilities equalizer.
That diagnosis applies precisely to the world of cryptocurrencies. On-chain analysis, risk management in DeFi protocols, smart contract auditing and customer service on exchanges are, to a large extent, routine cognitive work, exactly the type of work that the economists surveyed identify as most exposed to automation.
But there is another side. Agrawal himself warns that traditional intermediaries who do not migrate towards high-value services will see their business models crumble as the cost of prediction falls towards zero. For decentralized protocols that already operate without human intermediaries, that drop is a structural advantage, not a threat.
David Autor of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) offered a distinction that is useful in understanding the specific impact on the industry. Entry-level workers can benefit from AI because it compresses the learning curve, while those who do information processing at scale, without deep specialization, face the greatest risk of displacement.
In the digital asset ecosystem this translates into a clear bifurcation. High-level technical profiles—protocol developers, security researchers, blockchain system architects—are more likely to be amplified by AI.
Repetitive operational roles, such as those that have already been noted in companies in the sector with replacement estimates of up to 50% of certain positions, are the most vulnerable in the short term, as reported by CriptoNoticias.
The advantage of cryptocurrencies that no one is naming
There is one point that the 16 WSJ economists did not address directly, but that emerges from their analysis. When AI makes routine cognitive work in traditional finance cheaper, it reduces the main competitive advantage that classic intermediaries have had over decentralized finance, the cost of human expertise.
Protocols that automatically execute contracts, broker-free settlement systems, and self-executing custody platforms They don’t need to replace employees because they never had them.. In that sense, the labor revolution that economists anticipate could, paradoxically, be a tailwind for decentralized infrastructure.
Raffaella Sadun of Harvard Business School sums up well the type of skill that will survive: those who can think creatively about how AI generates value and translate those ideas quickly into action. When asked how people should prepare, they responded.
To young students, my recommendation is that you choose a field for which you have a true passion. Given the amount of uncertainty and change ahead, passion is what keeps me motivated to continue learning and adapting. But combine that passion with a willingness to tinker, experiment, and get your hands dirty with AI in your own realm.
Raffaella Sadun, professor at Harvard Business School.
In the cryptocurrency ecosystem, that already has a name: the protocol builders that integrate AI as an intelligence layer on decentralized infrastructure They could be the big beneficiaries of the next phase.
The debate on employment and technology has been unresolved for decades. But for the first time, disruption targets the heart of the conventional financial system. And this time, digital assets are not the target of disruption. They could be part of the answer.
What is coming in the next five years outlines a scenario in which the competitive advantage in finance will no longer be in who has the most analysts, but in who has the best infrastructure to do without them.
Decentralized protocols that integrate AI as an execution and intelligence layer will not only survive that transition, they could define what the financial system looks like on the other side of it. The question the market has not yet finished asking is how long it will take for this to be reflected in asset prices.