The numbers come first. Total U.S. employment will rise by 5.9 million jobs to 176.2 million between 2025 and 2035, growth of just 3.5% — a fraction of the 10.9% pace notched the prior decade, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The utility industry will hire fastest of any sector, growing employment 9.8% as hyperscalers race to build data centers that require immense amounts of electricity. BLS attributes 'nearly all the job growth' in utilities to electric power generation, transmission, and distribution tied to rising demand, 'including artificial intelligence power demands.' Within that category, solar electric power generation jobs will jump 153% and wind 62%, though the sector overall adds a modest 58,800 positions.
Healthcare and social assistance will dwarf that gain, adding 2.2 million jobs — 37% of all new jobs created through 2035 — on a 9.5% growth rate, the second-fastest of any industry. BLS cites the aging population and rising chronic disease, including heart disease, cancer, and diabetes. Nurse practitioners will see employment surge 41%, and medical and health services managers will climb 24%.
Despite warnings of an AI-driven 'jobs apocalypse,' the professional, scientific, and technical services industry will be the third-fastest-growing sector, up 8.6%, adding 926,700 jobs — the second-most of any industry. Data scientist roles are projected to grow 34.6%, and computer and information research scientists 21.8%. The report notes that OpenAI's Sam Altman and Anthropic's Dario Amodei have both walked back earlier predictions of mass AI-driven job losses, even as their companies pursue blockbuster IPOs.
The other side of the ledger tells its own story. Office and administrative support work will shrink 4%, or 752,100 jobs — the largest decline of any major occupational group. Sales and related occupations will fall 1.4% as e-commerce expands and firms embed AI further into business processes. BLS notes that generative AI, by automating repetitive tasks, 'may limit demand for some jobs in the arts, design, entertainment, sports, and media occupational group.'
The market has already voted, and it is voting for output, not overhead. The industries set to expand — power generation, patient care, applied science — are the ones tied directly to real demand: electricity for an AI-driven economy, treatment for an aging population, and technical talent for firms actually building things. The industries in retreat are the ones AI can automate outright: paperwork, routine sales, repetitive administrative tasks.
Capital rewards clear rules and real need, not headcount for its own sake. For a decade, critics on the left have warned that automation would simply immiserate American workers. The BLS data tells a more disciplined story: productivity gains are shedding clerical bloat while channeling hiring toward energy infrastructure and frontline healthcare — precisely where free enterprise, not government mandate, is doing the allocating. The office bureaucracy shrinks; the power grid and the patient's bedside grow. That is the market doing what bureaucracies rarely do on their own.
