The Employment Service announced this week the establishment of the Employment Intelligence Center (Mabat) — the first national center for research, monitoring, and preparing the labor market for the age of artificial intelligence. The center will operate in cooperation with the National Digital Agency, high-tech companies, and the OECD, with the goal of ensuring a relevant and up-to-date labor market.
CEO of the Employment Service, Inbal Mashash, explained that the rapid spread of artificial intelligence is already reshaping the labor market. “Our responsibility is not to wait, but to turn the change into an opportunity,” she said. “Otherwise, Israel could find itself with workers who have lost relevance and with widening social gaps. The threat to the labor market is not AI, the threat is indifference and lack of initiative.”
According to her, the service must shift from being reactive to proactive. To achieve this, the new center’s activities will focus on five main goals: promoting technological innovation in the labor market, creating “live employment intelligence” based on real-world data, training and developing human capital, fostering close cooperation between academia, industry, and government ministries, and formulating policy while translating data into practical recommendations.
The center is being launched amid a turbulent reality, as the Israeli labor market is already coping with severe shocks due to the security situation. Following Operation Roaring Lion last March, the number of people registered with the Employment Service jumped 2.5 times, reaching 396,000 people — a figure even higher than the peak during the Israel–Hamas War. Most of those affected by layoffs and unpaid leave are women, young people, and residents of peripheral areas.
Mashash sees investment in artificial intelligence as a dual solution: both for the immediate crisis and for building long-term national resilience. “The Employment Service will be the national hub of employment innovation, not only in Ramat Gan and Tel Aviv, but also in Kiryat Shmona, Dimona, and everywhere the change reaches,” Mashash declared. “Otherwise, we will continue creating a center-versus-periphery gap in the AI revolution as well.”
Concerns about these gaps are supported by troubling field data. A comprehensive study by the service, based on data from more than 1.2 million job seekers, found that exposure to Generative AI in geographically peripheral areas stands at only 40% compared to central Israel. Dr. Gal Zohar warned that the lack of exposure in the periphery could deny workers what he calls “employment immunity.” “Those who do not take part in the process already now will lose the advantage of adaptation once the technology becomes accessible to everyone,” he emphasized.
Dr. Gal Zohar notes that 70% of professions are expected to undergo significant changes in the near future: “An accountant today is not the accountant of 10 years ago, and a psychologist today is not the same psychologist who will exist in another 10 years.”
As part of the effort to bridge these gaps, the Employment Service has recently begun offering residents of northern Israel fully funded advanced technological training programs in fields such as digital marketing and the implementation of artificial intelligence within organizations.
At the same time as the technological revolution, the Employment Service is also being forced to deal with a new target population. Whereas in the past the service mainly assisted disadvantaged groups, Inbal Mashash points to a trend she describes as “the weakening of the strong.” Academics, software engineers, lawyers, and finance professionals are turning to the service in growing numbers.
The proportion of “strong” job seekers steadily rose from 16.1% in January 2023 to 20.8% in 2025. In addition, around 16,000 former high-tech industry employees, most of them software developers, have recently approached the service.
“The future is already here; this is something happening now, and we need to help make it happen,” Mashash concludes. “The mission we are leading is not to wait for people to come to us, but to meet them before that.”
