AI is reshaping the US labor market, but it’s unclear whether it’s broadly hitting employment

Amid fears that AI will ultimately wipe out wide swathes of white-collar work, it appears that productivity has risen more than employment has suffered.

The US Census Bureau’s bi-weekly Business Trends and Outlook Survey assesses corporate AI usage. Adoption steadily increased from 2023, with uptake especially high in knowledge-intensive services and larger firms.

We can track the BTOS survey against indicators from LinkUp, which provides weekly data on active job posts. There is little evidence of a broad, AI-driven collapse in hiring demand, even though the US labor market has decidedly cooled from the post-pandemic hiring boom. Sectors making prominent use of AI – such as finance and insurance, as well as categories linked to IT – have seen a slight increase in job postings versus 2023, even as they ramped up the use of tools such as Anthropic’s Claude, ChatGPT and virtual agents. Rather than replacing workers outright, AI may allow employees to boost productivity and keep their jobs