Risks Create a Jagged Frontier of LLM Productivity Gains Across Computer Occupations

Deepika Chawla

Gagandeep Singh

Elham Khorasani Buxton

Meicen Sun

Lav Varshney

Jeremy Riel

Craig De Voto

May 13, 2026
We argue that the current productivity frontier of expert-LLM collaboration is doubly jagged: it is uneven, not only because of jagged AI capabilities but also due to jagged AI risks. As LLM systems improve, incompetence-driven risks (e.g., Misinformation) may decline, but adversarial risks can persist or even increase, leading to the likely persistence of a jagged risk–reward frontier. To show jaggedness, we introduce the first occupation-level quantification of risk-aware productivity gains for expert–LLM collaboration over a realistic task distribution, using standard O*NET computer-occupation tasks. For each task, we leverage six frontier models (e.g., GPT-5, Claude Opus) to produce structured risk–reward ratings and use 6 human experts to verify a subset for reliability, achieving high agreement. Risk captures the possible increase in individual, organizational, or societal harm due to employing LLMs. The reward captures potential productivity gains, i.e., time/cost savings at a fixed quality target, after accounting for expert oversight to detect and mitigate errors and risks. We aggregate task-level ratings into occupation-level scores. Our analysis shows that risk varies more than reward, yielding vast differences in risk–reward tradeoff: In safety-critical roles (e.g., Information Security Engineers), gains are offset by risk, whereas in less safety-critical roles (e.g., Web Developers), gains often substantially exceed risks. At the task-level, we identify high-reward and medium-risk tasks as the "Sweet spot" for expert-LLM collaboration. The identified sweet spot is evident in real-world deployments as the majority of Claude conversations assigned to O*NET tasks (from the recent Anthropic Economic Index) are high-reward and medium-risk, whereas high-risk tasks are minimally represented, supporting our methodology.

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May 13, 2026
Deepika Chawla,Gagandeep Singh, Elham Khorasani Buxton, Meicen Sun, Lav Varshney, Jeremy Riel, Craig De Voto (). Risks Create a Jagged Frontier of LLM Productivity Gains Across Computer Occupations. Published in . Retrieved from https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6381580. Accessed .
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@article{,
  title     = { Risks Create a Jagged Frontier of LLM Productivity Gains Across Computer Occupations },
  author    = { Deepika Chawla,Gagandeep Singh, Elham Khorasani Buxton, Meicen Sun, Lav Varshney, Jeremy Riel, Craig De Voto },
  journal   = {  },
  year      = {  },
  url       = { https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6381580 }
}
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