AI will create more jobs than it destroys

When a technology makes workers more productive, it makes their labor more valuable, not less, lowering costs, expanding what a firm can attempt, and creating demand for work nobody had imagined.

This is likely to be the net impact of AI. By reducing the cost of analysis, prediction, communication, coordination, and—increasingly in its agentic form—action, AI makes a wide range of services cheaper and more scalable. This will eventually increase demand, while also enablin…

AI creates value. Value creates growth. And growth creates demand for new kinds of work.

Will A.I. disrupt the labor market? Absolutely. The United States has a long track record of creating new jobs in response to disruption, from the electrification of the 1900s to the digital revolution of the 1990s.

Technology doesn’t kill jobs. It kills professions. Every technological revolution destroys certain professions but creates entirely new ones. We tend to focus on what’s being destroyed rather than what’s being created.

The creation of Excel did not put accountants out of work. It actually further increased the demand for accountants. And I think the same is going to be true for AI.

The doomsday case rests on a flawed arithmetic: If AI can do 40 percent of a job’s tasks, then 40 percent of the work must go. But a job is not a to-do list of separable chores. Firms employ people for bundles of work held together by judgment, coordination, client trust and acco…

Our belief is that AI will largely augment human capability and not replace it. Creativity, judgement, communication and collaboration become much more important, because they leverage the benefits of human capability rather than compete with technology.

The greatest value often comes from making expertise easier to access and apply, rather than attempting to replace it altogether.

AI delivers significant productivity gains by saving a few minutes for every employee—not by replacing jobs.

The companies winning this transition aren't replacing workers with AI, they're multiplying human judgment at scale.

In 2026, that integration of AI into the very fabric of work will spread into other departments across the organization - not to replace people’s roles, but to extend their capabilities.

AI adoption has not yet resulted in widespread job loss but instead is associated with productivity gains and employment growth in high-exposure occupations.

Companies making significant investments in AI grew their workforces faster than comparable firms. The findings counter predictions that AI adoption will lead to broad job loss.

Companies most able to use AI are seeing faster headcount growth than the least AI-exposed companies (52% vs 36%) and higher wage growth (24% vs 17%).

The 1,640 IT decision-makers Box surveyed for our 2026 State of AI in the Enterprise report reveal what’s actually happening: 58% expect their organization's total headcount to rise over the next three years. Of the most mature companies in terms of AI adoption, that number rises…

Our research shows that firms that invest more in AI also hire more following adoption, including in entry-level roles. These are early results that we will update over time, but should provide some confidence to the public about the potential gains of this technology.

Despite concerns of AI-driven job losses, a new study from JLL finds that a majority of senior business leaders expect their workforces to grow (60%), not shrink (40%) – similarly, most expect AI to reinvent human roles (60%), rather than replace them (40%).

Ninety-four percent of HR leaders believe AI will generate new entry-level roles that do not yet exist. The opportunity to expand access to leadership development is genuine but only if organizations move forward with intention rather than assumption.

Our data shows AI is reshaping work at the task level, creating new job categories even as it changes others. Whether a Fortune 500 company or small local business, this is a critical time for employers to focus on upskilling today’s workers and preparing their organizations for …

Virtually every major technology wave in history has ultimately created more opportunities than it destroyed. The internet gave rise to roles that simply didn’t exist in 1995. AI is doing the same thing right now. New roles like AI trainers, agent specialists, AI security experts…

The workforce being built around the agentic enterprise will be larger, differently shaped, and concentrated around capabilities that did not exist on most org charts just a few years ago.

Complex AI-augmented work is driving higher earnings and new roles.

The AI-born economy is a redefinition of human work. The jobs that did not exist yesterday are not replacements for human effort. They are expressions of it, built for a world where machines handle the predictable and people handle everything else.

Businesses that report using AI to improve business operations are more likely to report reductions in workforce headcount than those using AI for other purposes.

AI's employment impact has turned modestly negative, reversing the more positive picture in 2025. In contrast, the latest S&P Global Purchasing Managers' Index survey shows a global net impact of -5 percentage points over the past 12 months, with a further -2 points net impact fo…

Companies are already laying off workers citing AI, so we must understand how American workers are at risk.

AI is therefore replacing existing workers, while simultaneously shutting them out from moving to other industries.

But from me, from my version, definitely from the communities which we are coming from, the employment is often taken away because of AI from our people, which is a reality.

And AI will destroy millions of jobs and decimate the middle class.

Firms are hiring fewer junior workers because AI now handles the routine work that once trained future experts, quietly draining the pipeline that produces senior judgment.

Remove the entry point, and a company may look more efficient for a few quarters, but its talent is at risk of becoming frozen at precisely the moment it needs to evolve fastest.

This generation of capable workers is being squeezed out right when companies will need them most.

Companies should automate repetitive tasks, not the learning environment.

I welcome the Government providing a great deal of skills education, but I do not see how the Government know what skills the marketplace is looking for in AI, particularly in the situation in which we find ourselves, where the recruitment marketplace has been so badly damaged by…

Some 42% of young people agree that AI is threatening their job prospects, and 49% are wary of the future of AI and its impact on their future work.

Good AI needs to complement humans, and this requires a redirection, because the current focus on AGI is, in all but name, an agenda for displacing humans from meaningful work.

The financing for new models is coming from investors, and those investors are making a bet that the AI they're funding will be so good that employers can fire half their workers and replace them with AI, with the proceeds split between AI companies' customers, and the AI compani…

Productivity can just as easily mean businesses doing the same work with fewer people.

Now, like many technologies, AI will make some people billionaires and more people unemployed.

AI will create new jobs, and for a short and fortunate grace period it really will look like it is creating more than it destroys. The danger lies in believing that window will stay open. It will not.

AI and humanoid robots break that logic because they are general-purpose. Yes, the disruption will create new jobs. The problem is that AI and robots will be able to do those new jobs too.

So AI will create new jobs, and for a short and fortunate grace period it really will look like it is creating more than it destroys.

Competition between AI providers increases the speed of labor displacement if it is intense.

The only meaningful guardrails around workplace AI are happening at the bargaining table, where workers are showing up and demanding protections.

We also need the Government to introduce a raft of measures to manage AI-driven changes to work. Those measures should include an employment levy on companies that replace large numbers of workers with AI, training subsidies for displaced workers, redeployment programmes to move …

Without these investments, AI risks widening inequality, displacing workers and shifting wealth from labour to capital rather than creating sustainable good jobs – those with fair compensation, worker autonomy and a reliable path to social dignity.

Automation is rapidly dissolving jobs, threatening to turn years of sacrifice into obsolete skills.

When we look at the evidence today specifically around AI reducing employment, at the moment there is quite inconclusive evidence about whether AI equals a significant reduction in employment.

The first thing to say is that the capabilities of AI are rising faster than expected, and the evidence on how that is translating into fundamental changes in labour-market demand, in employer behaviour, in productivity, is actually quite limited and contradictory.

But of course, new jobs and new tasks are also going to be created. And that balance between the jobs going away and new jobs being created, we really don't know.

Representative Foushee's AI Workforce Impact Study Act of 2026 is an important step toward understanding how AI is reshaping work and America's economy. Our data on AI's effects is fragmented and incomplete but this bill will help ensure that future decisions are based on the fac…

Workers should not have to guess how artificial intelligence is affecting their jobs or their futures. As I outlined in my report last year on AI's impact on American jobs, Congress needs reliable data to better understand these changes. We need to know where jobs are being lost,…

Increasing use of information technology (IT), including artificial intelligence (AI), will boost demand for workers in some occupations over the 2024–34 decade, while other occupations may see their numbers decrease.

I think both outcomes are likely to occur depending on the industry.

What’s missing at this inflection point is a framework that gets us beyond narrow debates or silver-bullet thinking, recognizing that AI’s impacts will be unevenly felt across industries, types of workers, and regions.

Right now, we are not seeing evidence of large-scale AI-related layoffs in California's labor market. But we do see patterns in certain regions like the Bay Area, in certain tech-heavy sectors, and among highly AI-exposed workers with college degrees. It will be important to cont…

AI is going to reshape the world of work, with some jobs more impacted than others, but AI will also create new roles and opportunities.

AI is bringing a massive evolution in the world of work, but a job apocalypse is not on the horizon. It’s more about changing roles and tasks than eliminating jobs.

There is no evidence to date of broad AI-driven labour-market upheaval in Australia. Overall labour market conditions remain strong by historical standards, youth outcomes have mostly held up, and occupational reshuffling has not accelerated. However, occupations more exposed to …

95% of firms that are using AI have reported no change in their headcount, and 86% using AI report no change in the nature of the jobs they are doing. It looks more like we are seeing augmentation at the moment rather than a general transformation of the workplace.

The report does not conclude that AI will lead to mass unemployment. The evidence is more nuanced. Labor market effects are better understood through tasks, new work creation, and job quality.

First, on unemployment, half of all UK workers feel that they will lose their job to AI. From what I can see, there is very mixed evidence about that so far, beyond the field of software development.

Harnessing the benefits of GenAI requires more than access to technology. Productivity gains depend on investments in human capital and social protection. Ultimately, future labour market outcomes will depend less on exposure alone than on the policy choices to build the prepared…

Decisions made now about training, skills development, job design and inclusion will shape whether AI expands participation or quietly narrows it.

AI has the potential to enhance job roles and the performance of each of us at work, but it is necessary and reasonable, as my hon. Friend the Member for Poole pointed out, to distinguish the jobs that are most at risk—those least likely to be enhanced and most likely to be repla…

Labour market economists have long demonstrated that the amount of work in the economy is not fixed, and that labour market adjustments can create more jobs. Yet this ‘lump of labour fallacy’ is still applied to debates about technological innovation. We agree that AI may produce…

We need to think a lot harder about what jobs are, how they will evolve, and that will help us give advice to people about labor-market trends rather than being optimistic or pessimistic.