AI is creating more work, countering the doomers for now
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Illustration: Aïda Amer/Axios
Here's something to tell the AI doomers: There's new evidence that instead of bringing on a job apocalypse, AI is creating more work, and, yes, jobs.
Why it matters: There's a more nuanced and optimistic story at play when it comes to AI and the workplace.
The latest: The fund giant Vanguard has released an intriguing analysis finding that both wage and job growth increased over the past two years in the occupations most exposed to AI, compared with those with less exposure.
- A separate survey, meanwhile, found that most institutional investors and CEOs expect AI to drive an increase in hiring across all levels in 2026.
The big picture: There's no question the job market has slowed down this year — the latest numbers from the federal government show persistent weakness.
- The tech sector and professional occupations like consulting are seeing job losses and fewer job openings.
- But the explanations are less about AI and more about other big macroeconomic factors.
- More recently, sweeping federal job cuts and restrictive immigration policy have had an impact.
"There's a lot of change happening in the labor market right now," says economist Martha Gimbel, executive director of the Budget Lab at Yale.
- It has been difficult to tease out the impact that AI is having amid these other shifts.
Zoom in: Vanguard looked at a Labor Department database with detailed information on nearly every occupation in the U.S. — things like skill and knowledge requirements and day-to-day responsibilities.
- It identified jobs where people perform tasks that can be augmented or replaced by AI — data analysis, for example— as well as roles with low exposure to AI, like construction or cleaning.
What they found: Real wages increased 3.8% in the occupations with the highest AI exposure from the second quarter of 2023 to the second quarter of 2025, compared with 0.7% in all other occupations.
- Job growth was up 1.7%, compared with a 0.8% gain.
- AI is making work more productive and letting people focus on more higher value activities, the analysis concludes.
How it works: Software engineering may be an intriguing example.
- AI has made software engineering more productive and less costly, Box CEO Aaron Levie said earlier this month at an Axios conference. And that's raised demand for software, he said, noting this is happening at his company.
- "If you lower the cost of building software, you have 10 times the use cases for software. That's the part that everybody misses."
- "The people who predicted mass job destruction will be proven wrong," Levie said.
Between the lines: Improvements in tech creating more demand and work is not a new trend. Think back, for example, to the iPhone's early days. The new device enabled an entirely new app-based economy and new jobs we'd never seen before.
Reality check: We are still in the early stages of the AI transition and the technology is moving faster than anyone could've predicted. The new evidence is a snapshot of where we are now — not a forecast of where we are headed.
What to watch: Much of the current investment in AI is in infrastructure that supports the technology — in building data centers, for example, not hiring.
- That kind of spending could lead to more productivity gains that eventually benefit workers at scale, as Axios' Neil Irwin recently explained.
The bottom line: "Automation has been going on for centuries and jobs still exist," as economist Jed Kolko wrote in 2018. That's probably still true.
