Every few weeks, a new study or executive prediction claims to reveal AI's impact on jobs. One predicts widespread displacement. Another expects growth. Each new finding gets treated as the definitive answer. However, the story is more nuanced than a single study.
The Narrative is Shifting
Both OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei recently acknowledged that they were wrong about AI’s impact on jobs. Amodei now says he expects automation to actually expand job responsibilities. The shift isn't limited to individual executives. An EY-Parthenon survey found that the share of CEOs expecting AI to result in significant headcount reductions fell from around 46% in January 2025 to 20% this past May.
Still, there are a number of skeptics. Even within Anthropic, there are differing views. Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah, speaking at the Vatican's AI ethics conference in May, said the risk of large-scale labor displacement remains very real.
Major companies are beginning to hire again after months of holding back. Some companies slowed entry-level hiring, thinking AI agents could pick up the slack. They have since realized that humans are necessary to work alongside AI. The CEO of staffing firm Robert Half said AI's impacts on the job market are proving "more benign than some have feared."
The Nuanced Reality
AI's impact on employment is not a single phenomenon. It’s several overlapping workforce dynamics playing out at different speeds, in different sectors, and at different levels of organizational commitment.
Heavy AI investors are hiring faster, but not immediately. A recent study of 22,000 US companies found that the heaviest AI spenders grew their white-collar headcount by 10.2%, with entry-level hiring up 12%. Companies in the bottom two-thirds of AI spending saw no significant change at all. But the gains took 6 to 12 months to materialize and were concentrated almost entirely in tech-sector companies.
The layoff narrative doesn't hold up to scrutiny. The reality of AI layoffs is likely more complicated than the headlines suggest. A significant portion of the workforce reductions being attributed to AI are better explained by slower sales, previous overhiring, and shifting priorities. Markets appear to agree: An FT analysis found that companies citing AI as a factor in job cuts underperformed the Nasdaq by nearly 10% in the 30 trading days following the announcement, compared with roughly 4% for those citing other factors. AI reduces the cost of generating content, analysis, and other deliverables, but it doesn't eliminate the need for judgment, synthesis, and governance. According to one survey, 32% of hiring managers are rehiring for those same roles they previously eliminated due to AI.
Some roles are growing because of AI. AI is creating new demand across very different parts of the economy. Demand for cybersecurity professionals is surging as AI rapidly expands the threat landscape. The data center construction boom is creating comparable pressure in the skilled trades. AI companies are recruiting electricians and carpenters by the thousands, with data center installation and maintenance jobs paying 42% more than similar roles in other fields. Google has committed $50 million to expand electrician apprenticeship enrollment, and Meta has allocated $115 million to train construction workers.
Entry-level work is changing, not disappearing. Nearly three times as many executives at companies using or exploring AI said they were increasing junior-level hiring in 2026. However, routine tasks are increasingly automated, while expectations around analytical thinking, judgment, and AI fluency are rising. A PwC analysis of more than a billion job postings across six continents found a 35% increase since 2019 in entry-level postings requiring skills traditionally expected of more senior staff. This trend actually predates generative AI and suggests the raising of the floor on entry-level work has been underway for longer than the current moment of AI attention implies.
AI is reshaping who does what. A recent analysis of ChatGPT usage patterns adds another layer to this picture. 44% of occupation-specific requests involve tasks that traditionally belong to a different profession entirely, with customer service workers, designers, and HR professionals showing the highest rates of task crossover (77%, 75%, and 69% respectively). Before AI changes how many people companies employ, it's changing who does what.
The same AI use isn't evaluated equally across employees. Employment outcomes aren't determined solely by which jobs exist. They also depend on how organizations evaluate the people using AI. One recent study found that identical AI-assisted work was evaluated differently depending on whether the candidate's name read as male or female, with women more likely to have their competence and trustworthiness questioned for the same AI use. As AI becomes part of everyday work, decisions about hiring, promotion, and performance may reflect not just AI capability, but how organizations perceive employees who use it.
What Organizations Should Do
The public debate about AI and employment tends toward binaries. AI will either eliminate jobs, or it will create jobs. Both claims are inadequate descriptions of what's actually happening. AI's workforce effects depend on several factors: investment depth, sector, organizational readiness, how long a company waits before measuring results, and how productivity gains get reinvested. The same technology, deployed differently, produces meaningfully different outcomes.
Some organizations aren't waiting for a definitive answer. Rather than betting on a single employment outcome, they're preparing for a future in which AI reshapes work in different ways across industries and occupations. RAISE US, a bipartisan consortium launched in June that includes Amazon, Microsoft, Bank of America, and several state governments, is working to develop what it calls a "people strategy" for the AI era. Its mandate goes beyond retraining programs to include reconsidering decades-old policies like unemployment insurance and exploring corporate incentives for employers to retain and retrain workers whose roles are disrupted.
For organizations trying to navigate this well, a few practices are worth prioritizing:
Tap internal AI champions. Many companies are turning to internal "AI champions," employees tapped to model and evangelize AI use among skeptical colleagues. These aren't necessarily the most technical people, but those who can act as translators between business needs and technical capabilities.
Redesign roles before you eliminate them. AI rarely automates an entire job. More often, it automates specific tasks. Organizations should rethink how work is divided before deciding a role is no longer needed. The strongest outcomes tend to come from combining AI with human judgment, not substituting one for the other.
Reskill employees. When Ingka Group deployed an AI chatbot to handle nearly half of Ikea’s customer service volume, it retrained the 8,500 displaced employees as interior design consultants rather than letting them go. The result was €1.3 billion in revenue in 2024, with that figure projected to reach 10% of total Ikea revenue by 2028.
Commit seriously. Light AI adoption is unlikely to produce meaningful gains or workforce transformation. Organizations seeing the strongest results are those that invested substantially in AI and measured outcomes over time.
Stay on Top of the Evolving AI and Employment Story
AI is producing several employment stories simultaneously. In some organizations, it's accelerating growth and hiring. In others, it's enabling restructuring or changing the skills companies expect from new hires. The decisions organizations make about how they deploy AI, invest in their workforce, redesign work, and measure success over time will play a major role in determining which story unfolds.
Move from research to execution around the clock with SuperAnalyst, AlphaSense's always-on AI agent that runs multi-step workflows on your behalf. Sign up for early access or start your free 2-week trial of AlphaSense today.
