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 just 4.1%, lower than in almost 90% of months over the past half-century. Young workers, often cast as AI’s first victims , are holding up remarkably well: the gap between unemployment among 20-24-year-olds and the overall rate is close to a multi-decade low.
PERHAPS AI WILL eventually make many humans unemployable —but there is no sign of it yet.
Some companies and workers are being severely disrupted by AI. Tech giants like 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. Add it all up, and The Economist estimates that AI has so far created around 1m new jobs in America. America’s AI infrastructure splurge has created many of them. That building spree requires armies of workers: electricians to wire them, HVAC specialists to stop racks from overheating, grid engineers to hook them up to the power supply and technicians to install and maintain the machines. The scramble for workers is showing up in pay cheques, too. Official wage data tell a similar story. Some of the occupations once believed to be most vulnerable to AI seem to be benefiting from this effect.
Hiring in professional and business services is running about 10% below the average in 2015-19. 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. That easily exceeds the roughly 200,000 lay-offs attributed to AI since mid-2023, and appears more than enough to offset weaker hiring in many back-office roles. The spending on the kit needed to make AI run—from chips and servers to data centres, cooling systems and power—is roughly $500bn a year above what it was in 2022, when the world got to know ChatGPT, calculates Goldman Sachs, a bank. Data-centre construction alone is proceeding at an annual rate of more than $75bn, nearly 60% higher than a year ago, according to Census Bureau data. Indeed finds that installation and maintenance jobs at data centres advertise wages about 40% higher than comparable work elsewhere. In the year to June, average hourly earnings rose more than 13% in electrical-equipment manufacturing and nearly 8% among electrical contractors. Between 2023 and 2025 employment among paralegals rose by about 11% and among market-research analysts by 6%, compared to a national average of around 2.5% (see chart 3).
Despite dire warnings of imminent lay-offs, professional services are projected to keep growing rapidly thanks to demand for AI systems and consulting, according to BLS forecasts.
