Dr. Gleb Tsipursky – The Office Whisperer
Nirit Cohen – WorkFutures
Angela Howard – Culture Expert
Drew Jones – Design & Innovation
Jonathan Price – CRE & Flex Expert
For all the corporate hype and Silicon Valley hand-wringing, new research suggests that the U.S. jobs market hasn’t yet experienced the AI apocalypse some have warned about.
In a new report, researchers from Yale’s Budget Lab and the Brookings Institution said they had found no evidence of any “discernible disruption” to jobs since the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in November 2022. The study found that most of the ongoing shifts in the U.S. occupational mix, a measure of the types of jobs people hold, were already underway in 2021, and recent changes don’t appear any more dramatic.
“While the occupational mix is changing more quickly than it has in the past, it is not a large difference and predates the widespread introduction of AI in the workforce,” the researchers wrote in the report. “Currently, measures of exposure, automation, and augmentation show no sign of being related to changes in employment or unemployment.”
Industries with higher AI exposure, such as Information, Financial Activities, and Professional and Business Services, have seen some downward shifts, but these trends largely began before ChatGPT’s launch.
The conclusion isn’t altogether shocking, although it flies in the face of some of the AI doomsayers’ more dramatic claims. Historically, major workplace disruptions have unfolded over decades, not months or years. Computers, for example, didn’t become common in offices until nearly 10 years after their debut, and it was even longer before they reshaped workflows.
If AI ends up transforming the labor market as dramatically as computers did — or more so — it’s reasonable to expect that broad effects will take longer than three years to appear.
Some executives have also told me they are taking a “wait and see” approach to hiring while they assess whether the tech can really deliver on its productivity promises. This approach can slow hiring and make the labor market feel sluggish, but it doesn’t necessarily mean workers are being automated out of their jobs.
While anxiety over the effects of AI on today’s labor market may be widespread, the new data suggests that this anxiety is still largely speculative.
Entry-level hiring woes
The real hiring pain has been felt by college grads and entry-level workers.
There’s no denying that AI is better at tasks typically done by this class of workers, and companies have increasingly been saying the quiet part out loud when it comes to junior roles. But claims that AI is keeping recent graduates out of work aren’t entirely supported by the new data.
When researchers compared jobless rates for recent graduates to those with more experience, new grads seemed to be having a slightly tougher time landing roles, but the gap wasn’t big enough to suggest technology is the main factor.
The researchers found a small increase in occupational dissimilarity compared to older graduates, which could reflect early AI effects but also could just as easily be attributed to labor market trends, including employers’ and job-seekers’ reactions to noise about AI replacing workers. The report suggests that entry-level struggles are more likely to be part of broader labor market dynamics rather than a direct result of AI adoption.
Recently, there have also been anecdotal but promising signs of life in the entry-level job market. For example, Shopify and Cloudflare are both increasing their intern intake this year, with Cloudflare calling AI tools a way “to multiply how new hires can contribute to a team” rather than a replacement for the new hires themselves. Younger workers are typically more receptive, more eager to experiment, and more creative when it comes to using emerging technology, which could give companies that hire them an edge.
As U.K.-based programmer Simon Willison put it: “An intern armed with AI tools can produce value a whole lot faster than interns in previous years.”
The researchers cautioned that the analysis isn’t predictive, and they plan to keep updating their findings. They also warned that the sample size is small.
Just because AI hasn’t significantly impacted the labor market yet doesn’t mean it won’t in the future. Some recent assessments, such as OpenAI’s new GDPval benchmark, show that leading AI models are getting better at performing professional tasks at or above human expert level in roughly half of cases, depending on the sector. As AI tools improve and companies get better at integrating them, the tech could have a more direct impact on the workforce.
But should we be thinking of AI as just the next computer, or as a new industrial revolution? At least for now, the jury’s still out.
Written by Beatrice Nolan for Fortune as “The AI jobs apocalypse is not yet upon us, according to new data” and republished with permission.
