AI Job Apocalypse? The Data Says Otherwise

For years, headlines have been screaming that robots are coming for your job. But a recent study from the Economic Innovation Group just crushed that story.

If you are worried that AI has already killed your career, the data says you can stop panicking.

The researchers looked at workers most “exposed” to AI, such as genetic counselors, financial examiners, and coders. These are the laptop-heavy jobs everyone says will be the first to disappear. Then they compared them to workers in roles with little to no AI exposure, like construction helpers and dancers.

Here is the twist. Unemployment is actually rising faster for the least AI-exposed workers. Since 2022, unemployment for the most AI-exposed group went up just 0.3 percentage points. For the least exposed, it climbed nearly a full percentage point.

If AI was really wiping out jobs, you would expect people to give up and leave the labor force. That is not happening. The most AI-exposed workers are the least likely to exit the workforce, and that rate has barely moved in three years.

Switching careers is not spiking either. People in AI-heavy jobs are not running away to “safer” roles. In fact, they are switching less often than they did before COVID.

Look at companies. If AI was gutting jobs, industries filled with AI-exposed workers should be shrinking. Instead, those industries have been adding jobs steadily since the pandemic. Even in sectors with high AI adoption, like publishing and data processing, the effect looks more like a slowdown than a crash.

As covered in a previous post entitled “Get a Degree, Get a Job” Stopped Working, unemployment is rising for young workers and new graduates. But here is the key: it is happening across the board, whether they enter AI-heavy roles or not. So the struggles of new grads cannot simply be pinned on AI.

AI adoption is still small. Only about 9 percent of firms report using it to make products or deliver services. Even in the information sector, where adoption is higher at about a quarter, it is far from universal.

In other words, AI is not destroying jobs. Not yet.

AI is changing tasks, not eliminating roles. Workers are using it to write code faster, summarize documents, or handle compliance checks. Companies are experimenting, but the mass layoffs blamed on AI are not showing up in the data.

The real risk is not that AI will erase all jobs overnight. The risk is being the worker who does not learn how to use it. If you lean in, learn the tools, and let them make you more productive, you will be more valuable, not less.

For example, the video above sheds light on AI skills increasingly becoming a necessity in the tech industry—emphasizing the need to learn and adapt among early-career professionals.

So if you are anxious about your career, remember this: the data says jobs are still here. The ones who thrive will be the people who adapt.