productive benefits of the transition, for example through equipping workers with foundational skills that can help them keep up with the changing character of jobs and drive the productive character of such changes, rather than see their skills become obsolete. The fact that some vulnerable groups, such as women and youth, face greater exposure to automation highlights the importance of life-long learning so that that workers have the skills to adapt to changes in the world of work. In the short-term, as shown in numerous ILO studies, social protection systems can play an important role as macroeconomic shock stabilizers, and reduce the impact of transitions for the affected workers and their households at the microeconomic level (ILO, 2023), especially when their use is combined with skills development programs (ILO, 2023e). In the medium and long-term, reducing gender gaps in the exposure to automation would require addressing factors that perpetuate occupational segregation by gender, such as gender-based social norms (Carranza et al., 2023).

At the same time, our findings show that the shares of jobs that could benefit from a productive transformation with GenAI are consistently higher than those with automation risks across all LAC countries, ranging between 8 and 12 percent of employment across countries. This is particularly the case for the jobs in education, health and personal services. In addition, the sectors oriented towards customer service (retail, trade, hotels, restaurants, etc.) face an elevated exposure to "the big unknown", which means that a productive augmentation could also be sought in these jobs with the right policies and incentives in place. Therefore, a tempting narrative that can be constructed based on these statistics is that, in the big picture, more can be gained than lost as a net job and economic effect of the transformation.

This is where our analysis provides new information to assess whether the lack of digital infrastructure could be a buffer or a bottleneck to reap the economic benefits of GenAI. On the one hand, our findings show that most workers exposed to GenAI automation are using digital technologies, which suggests that the potential negative effects may not take long to materialize. On the other hand, we find that inadequate digital infrastructure is a major bottleneck to realizing the positive effects of augmentation, thereby impacting a significant segment of the labor force in the LAC region. Nearly half of the occupations that could potentially benefit from augmentation are hampered by digital shortcomings that will prevent them from realizing that potential. Specifically, 6.24 percent of jobs held by women and 6.22 percent of those held by men are affected due to these gaps. Similar limitations apply to the jobs in the “big unknown” category: even though some of them could potentially pivot towards augmentation through increasing complementarity between GenAI and the worker in these occupations, the digital gaps will prevent large shares of these jobs from benefitting from such a scenario.

The extension of our finding is that the influence of digital divides would likely be even more stark in regions of lower economic development than LAC, which underlines the need for equalizing digital access in developing countries. Policies to achieve such goal should include not only those related to digital infrastructure, but also those that aim to strengthen the incentives to adopt digital technologies for a productive use (World Bank, 2016b)<sup>41</sup> to ensure that the transformative promise

> 41 World Bank (2016) provides several examples of policies not directly related to expanding the digital infrastructure that promote the adoption of digital technologies by firms and people, such as fostering more competition in product markets (both domestic and through international trade), improving the quality of the educational systems, etc.

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