The numbers refuse to settle
The latest U.S. jobs report did not help. Employers unexpectedly cut 23,000 jobs in July, yet some of the most aggressive AI spenders in the country are adding staff faster than before. The picture is contradictory — and that contradiction is now the central fact of the American labor market.
A study by financial services firm Ramp, covering more than 21,000 U.S. firms, found that companies it categorized as 'high-intensity' AI adopters expanded their overall staff by 10% and boosted entry-level hiring by 12% over two years. The bottom two-thirds of adopters recorded no headcount growth at all. The heaviest spenders tended to be smaller companies deploying advanced tools such as coding agents and APIs.
A separate report by researchers at Google found AI is so far being used mostly as a collaborative tool rather than an outright job-replacer. A June California Policy Lab study found no statewide spike in unemployment insurance claims among AI-exposed roles like software developers and customer service representatives since ChatGPT's release in late 2022 — though it did identify elevated claims for college-educated workers in highly-exposed roles and a significant increase in claims from high-exposed roles in the San Francisco area.
Big Tech layoffs cloud the signal
Microsoft laid off nearly 5,000 people in early July as it continues to pour billions into AI data centers. Amazon and Oracle have also shed thousands of workers over the last two years. Whether AI is the direct cause, however, remains contested.
'There's been discretion out there as to what extent the layoffs we have been observing are really driven by AI,' Till Von Wachter, a professor of economics at UCLA, told Fortune. 'It's been notoriously hard to pin that down.'
Ramp's lead economist Ara Kharazian offered a sharper read: Big Tech 'definitely overhired during the pandemic and are now making the decisions to correct that overhiring.' Some are 'blaming it on AI. But what we're seeing from firms that are using AI that didn't have that overhiring problem is that they're continuing to grow.'
Researchers call the distortion 'AI washing' — companies attributing layoffs to AI to appear forward-thinking, or the reverse, avoiding any mention of the technology for fear of public backlash. Most existing research has had to rely on estimates of which tasks AI could potentially perform rather than actual spending or usage records.
The warning shot from 200 economists
In July, nearly 200 economists and researchers published a statement warning that AI could cause large-scale job displacement in the next decade. 'This could drive an unprecedented transformation of our economy, larger than the Industrial Revolution, but unfolding over a vastly shorter time frame,' the statement reads. Signatories include Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark and former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt. The statement calls on policymakers to 'act now' to better understand the transformation and to create legislation that will 'steer A.I. in a direction that complements humans and benefits society.'
Ben Zipperer from the Economic Policy Institute told Fortune that AI's impact on jobs has so far been more limited than some doomsday scenarios initially predicted.
What the market is actually telling us
The Ramp data carries a message that free-enterprise readers should not miss: firms that committed capital to AI and avoided the pandemic-era hiring binge are outgrowing their peers. That is how productive markets are supposed to work — resources flow toward the most disciplined operators.
The call for preemptive legislation is a different matter. When the data itself is this unsettled, rushed regulatory frameworks risk locking in today's confusion as tomorrow's compliance burden — taxing the very experimentation that the Ramp numbers show is driving growth. The taxpayer and the worker are best served by letting the evidence accumulate before Washington writes the rules.
