The job market has begun looking shakier. How much is artificial intelligence to blame?
Not a whole lot. At least not yet.
A review of employment surveys, interviews with labor market analysts and recent company earnings reports shows little evidence, so far, that would support assertions of a widespread economic impact from AI’s growing usage.
“It’s such an emotional thing for people, many of whom are determined to see it in the data,” said Martha Gimbel, executive director and co-founder of the Budget Lab at Yale University and a former President Joe Biden economic adviser. “And it’s just not there yet.”
Much is riding on the payoff from AI. The stock market has been hitting record highs largely thanks to gains from tech giants like Nvidia, Google parent Alphabet, Facebook parent Meta and Microsoft, which have made enormous investments in pumping out AI-related products.
For precisely that reason, analysts say, some businesses may be incentivized to hype AI’s potential as a disruptive force. Through the end of July, the term “AI” has been cited on about two-thirds of second-quarter earnings calls conducted by S&P 500 companies, according to the data provider Factset. That’s up from less than half in the first quarter.
Amid a downshifting economy, cost pressures are mounting, prompting corporate leaders to hype AI’s potential as a savings source — even if it’s not quite there yet.
“In 2023, you’d have a high-profile public company do a job cut and cite rising interest rates or uncertain macro conditions,” Roger Lee, a tech entrepreneur who also runs a website that tracks tech industry layoffs, said. ”Today, it’s AI.”
The most extreme warning about AI’s short-term impact has come from Dario Amodei, co-founder and CEO of AI firm Anthropic. In May, he told Axios that he foresees half of all entry-level white-collar jobs being wiped out in the next one to five years, spiking unemployment to between 10% and 20%.
So far, evidence for this scenario is mixed. All job openings, entry-level or otherwise, have been declining since 2023, according to labor market analytics company Revelio Labs, though the trend has not been linear. Revelio said entry-level jobs exposed to AI have been declining fastest — but senior roles exposed to AI have actually begun to recover.
The broader picture for white-collar professions most at risk of disruption actually indicates fairly stable employment trends. Last week’s official jobs report showed office and administrative roles have actually returned to their pandemic-era highs, while employment in other professional sectors, like accounting and legal services, has held relatively steady.
It’s a gloomier story in tech — but also a more nuanced one when it comes to AI’s impact. The leaders of Amazon and Microsoft have both signaled the ability to run their businesses with reduced headcount thanks to AI. Tech layoffs tracked by Lee’s website hit a three-month high in July, with three companies — Intel, Microsoft and Recruit Holdings, the parent of Indeed and Glassdoor — largely responsible.
All three of those companies cited artificial intelligence as playing a role in the job reductions, Lee said. But he noted that in the case of Recruit Holdings, there were no specifics about how AI had impacted the lost positions. The company simply said the technology was “changing the world.”
“It does seem like many of the roles being cut are in line with ones being used by AI,” Lee said. “But it’s still being used as a cover in other cases.”
A representative for Recruit did not respond to a request for comment.
The simple calculus behind AI is that businesses will be able to do more with less, increasing overall productivity while reducing hiring needs. Yet economists say it is difficult to calculate accurate changes in productivity over the short term — though so far, the broadest national measure has shown a deceleration in recent quarters.
Most of the benefits of AI are instead accruing to consumers, not businesses, according to a forthcoming paper from researchers at Carnegie Mellon and Stanford University. If it feels like much of the value from the current generation of AI seems mostly to allow ordinary people to generate emails and papers faster, or do quicker research, you’re not imagining things.
“Free goods are invisible in the GDP numbers, even if they make consumers better off,” the authors, Avinash Collis and Erik Brynjolfsson, wrote in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed. They calculate consumers derived the equivalent of $97 billion in surplus welfare from generative AI in 2024, compared with $7 billion in revenues logged by the tech firms actually creating AI products.
Economies typically see a “J-curve” effect when transformative technologies are introduced, Collis told NBC News. At first there is a bottleneck that can cause some disruptions, though these initial effects are often not captured in official figures. For example, the iPhone increased the total global volume of photos from billions to trillions, something that directly impacted workers at camera giant Kodak, but created incalculable opportunities elsewhere, Collis said.
“There will likely be a lot of impact, perhaps on some sectors negatively,” Collis said. “But at the same time lots of new jobs could be created as well.”
Other indicators do suggest the stirrings of a more pronounced AI effect on jobs. The July employment survey from consultancy Challenger, Gray and Christmas found companies have blamed “automation and AI implementation” for 20,000 job cuts in 2025, with another 10,000 or so directly attributable to artificial intelligence. Challenger said this shows “a significant acceleration in AI-related restructuring.”
Those figures are dwarfed by cuts related to government spending declines and general economic and market conditions, which account for nearly 500,000 lost roles this year, Challenger said.
Some companies appear to be keeping payroll counts steady in response to the broad uncertainty in the economy, and using any additional resources to explore AI’s potential to boost their bottom lines. Stacy Spikes, CEO of MoviePass, told NBC News that internal workflows at his company become vastly more efficient thanks to AI. That’s made him more gun-shy about bringing on new workers into certain departments, like software. As of Tuesday, MoviePass’ careers page showed no open positions.
“We haven’t seen headcount need to increase,” Spikes said.
Businesses like MoviePass still appear to be the exception, however. Analysts at Goldman Sachs say only about 9% of all companies are regularly using new AI tools to produce goods or services. As a result, they see only limited effects at the moment.
“When I look at the impact that AI has had on the overall labor market data so far, it looks pretty small to me,” Joseph Briggs, head of the global economics team at Goldman Sachs Research, said on a recent company podcast. Even for recent college grads, who have seen unemployment rates tick higher, “the anecdotes and the relationship that the anecdotes have to AI is often a little bit overstated,” Briggs said.
JP Morgan analysts came to a similar conclusion, finding that, for now, its research “failed to find a significant impact on job growth.”
But they cautioned that this could change at the next economic downturn.
For white-collar workers, “we think that during the course of the next recession the speed and the breadth of the adoption of the AI tools and applications in the workplace might induce large scale displacement for occupations,” they said in a recent note to clients.
Others remain more optimistic about the potential for new opportunities to overcome any negative effects. That’s how Nvidia co-founder and CEO Jensen Huang sees it. As the head of an AI giant, he may also have reason to hype its potential — but his outlook is notably rosier than Anthropic’s Amodei’s. Huang told Axios last month that the technology would ultimately lead to more jobs, even if there are some redundancies elsewhere.
“Everyone’s jobs will change,” he said. “Some jobs will be unnecessary. Some people will lose jobs. But many new jobs will be created. … The world will be more productive.”
