AI could displace up to three million jobs in the UK’s private sector, though actual job loss is predicted to be only in the hundreds, according to new research from the Tony Blair Institute.

The thinktank predicts that between 60,000 and 275,000 jobs are set to be displaced every year over two decades at the height of AI disruption, but new roles will also be created as the technology proliferates.

The Institute did say that this scale of job displacement is unlikely to compound into long-term job losses, since AI is likely to create new worker demands in different fields and overall, the economy will retain many of its workers.

Jobs where workers perform “routine cognitive tasks” such as administration, and data-heavy industries are more likely to be impacted than industries that require complex manual labour, the thinktank’s report said.

Though one to three million jobs may be impacted, the resulting losses will be “relatively modest” in comparison to the job losses seen in the past decade in the UK, which amounted to 450,000 per year.

The thinktank also predicts that AI’s potential for time saving and positive impact on productivity will boost economic growth across the UK, though it is unlikely for these benefits to be evenly distributed across businesses.

Smaller firms may find bespoke AI systems prohibitively expensive to adopt and therefore may not be able to see the economic benefits of AI due to this hurdle.

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Still, the Tony Blair Institute found that AI could increase the UK national income by five to 14% by 2050.

Despite these lofty estimates, the thinktank expects it to be a while before AI’s impact reaches its peak. It predicts that the AI’s impact will be “relatively modest in the near-term,” with GDP raising just between 0.1 and 1% in the next five years, and unemployment up by 180,000 by 2030.

However, by 2035, the Institute imagines GDP will have risen from 0.6 to 6%, saying that AI can have a profound “slow-burn effect” on the economy.