“As we look across the broader labor market, we see that AI’s impact on the labor market has still been fairly small,” said Cory Stahle, a senior economist at Indeed, a job search site.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“The important asterisk is that that doesn’t mean that it has been zero,” he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Mandi Woodruff-Santos, a career coach, agrees, “I don’t think AI is to blame, I think the economic uncertainty is to blame.”<\/p>\n
The state of the job market<\/p>\n The job market has not been good<\/a> in recent months, whether you’re looking for a job<\/a> or currently employed.<\/p>\n The U.S. economy added about 22,000 jobs<\/a> for the month of August, while the unemployment rate rose to 4.3%, according <\/a>to a Bureau of Labor Statistics report on Friday. Economists surveyed by Dow Jones had been looking for payrolls to rise by 75,000.<\/p>\n Of those who are still employed, some are “job hugging<\/a>,” or “holding onto their job for dear life,” according to an August report<\/a> by Korn Ferry, an organizational consulting firm.<\/p>\n But others are “quiet cracking<\/a>,” which is a “persistent feeling of workplace unhappiness that leads to disengagement, poor performance, and an increased desire to quit,” according to<\/a> cloud learning platform TalentLMS.<\/p>\n Growing economic uncertainty has kept workers from quitting their jobs and has led businesses to slow down hiring decisions<\/a>, experts say.<\/p>\n “No business knows what the heck the Trump administration is going to do next with the economy,” said Woodruff-Santos.<\/p>\n “And in this kind of economic climate, companies are not sure of anything, and so they’re being very conservative with the way that they’re hiring,” she said.<\/p>\n How artificial intelligence is impacting the labor force<\/p>\n While some companies have announced layoffs to pursue AI technologies in their organizations, most of the impact has been isolated in the tech industry, said Indeed’s Stahle.\u00a0<\/p>\n Most recently, Salesforce<\/a> CEO Marc Benioff<\/a> said <\/a>the company laid off about 4,000 customer support roles, due to advancements in the company’s use of artificial intelligence software.<\/p>\n Other studies show AI has mostly affected younger workers rather than mid-career employees.\u00a0<\/p>\n An August report <\/a>by Stanford University professors found that early career workers (ages 22 to 25) in the most AI-exposed occupations experienced a 13% decline in employment. On the flip side, employment for workers in less exposed fields and more experienced workers in the same occupations has either stayed the same or grown.<\/p>\n The study also found that employment declines are concentrated in occupations “where AI is more likely to automate rather than augment human labor.”\u00a0<\/p>\n More from Personal Finance: Yet, the tech industry itself is not a large sector, said Stahle. According <\/a>to a March 2025 analysis by nonprofit trade association CompTIA, or the Computing Technology Industry Association, “net tech employment” made up about 5.8% of the overall workforce.<\/p>\n Net tech employment is a designation that represents all those employed in the industry, including workers in technical positions such as cybersecurity and business professionals employed by technology companies, as well as full-time and self-employed technology workers.<\/p>\n For AI-driven layoffs to be considered a broad threat to the job market, the technology needs to start impacting other sectors, such as retail and marketing, said Stahle.<\/p>\n ‘We’re seeing more and more demand for AI skills’<\/p>\n Some predictions on AI’s workforce impact contend that employers may be more likely to retrain workers rather than lay them off, according <\/a>to a new report by the Brookings Institution, a public policy think tank.<\/p>\n “AI may be more likely to augment rather than fully replace human workers,” the authors wrote.<\/p>\n
Why coffee prices are so high<\/a>
Record numbers of retirement savers are now 401(k) or IRA millionaires<\/a>
68 jobs may qualify for Trump’s $25,000 ‘no tax on tips’ deduction<\/a><\/p>\n
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