The jobs apocalypse is postponed. An AI jobs boom is here

The Economist

6 min read13 Sep 2026, 09:05 PM IST

Summary

Some companies and workers are being severely disrupted by AI. Hiring in professional and business services is running about 10% below the average in 2015-19.

PERHAPS machines will make many humans unemployable eventually—but there is no sign of it yet. On September 4th the Bureau of Labour Statistics reported that the American economy added 162,000 jobs in August, far above expectations. The unemployment rate is 4.1%, lower than in almost 90% of months over the past half-century. Young workers, often cast as the first victims of artificial intelligence, are doing just fine: the gap between unemployment among 20-24-year-olds and the overall rate is close to a multi-decade low.

Some companies and workers are being severely disrupted by AI. Hiring in professional and business services is running about 10% below the average in 2015-19. Tech giants such as Microsoft and Meta are trimming headcounts as they reorganise their businesses around the technology. Smaller firms such as Block, the owner of Square and Cash App, and Intuit, the maker of TurboTax and QuickBooks, are replacing people with bots. American companies have announced some 16,000 AI-related job cuts a month on average so far this year, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas, an employment consultancy.

But AI-related layoffs get lost in a churning jobs market where employers shed roughly 1.7m workers in a typical month. And the evidence so far is that AI is already creating a lot of jobs to replace those it has destroyed. The vast sums pouring into data centres and power generation have set off a race for construction and infrastructure workers. AI startups are hiring like there is no tomorrow. Incumbents racing to keep up are creating new AI roles. And by making some workers more productive, AI may be increasing demand for their services.