The fear that AI is killing jobs has been fueled by ongoing layoffs across corporate America, most recently at companies like Visa. Just this week, the payments giant revealed plans to shed 7% of its headcount, a move that will impact 2,600 employees. While Bloomberg reported that AI wasn’t the only factor driving the layoffs, CEO Ryan McInerney clearly cited it in his memo, noting AI would “shape the way work gets done at Visa.” Some of its peers, like PayPal, have also made bold cuts to their workforce in recent months. Companies in various sectors have been slashing customer service jobs, replacing some of them entirely with AI.
But as researchers have repeatedly pointed out, these layoffs still don’t point to widespread job displacement. In fact, a new report from ZipRecruiter suggests that some companies may actually be adding jobs due to AI. When ZipRecruiter surveyed over a thousand recruiters and hiring leaders, more than a third of them—nearly 35%—said AI will increase headcount at their company in the near future. Almost a quarter of them said hiring due to AI had already increased accordingly; over a third said AI had already enabled them to accelerate their recruiting process. Nearly as many respondents—32.5%—said the mix of jobs would change in the next three to five years as a result of AI, even if headcount didn’t dramatically change.
By comparison, the number of people who said they were actively hiring less due to AI was far smaller at 16%, and only 14.4% said they had plans to decrease headcount in the coming years. What does seem to be changing, however, is job expectations: Nearly three-quarters of people surveyed said AI skills were now either a major advantage or requirement for certain roles; over half of employers also expect that their workers will now be more productive.
Economists and researchers have warned for some time now that the narrative around AI-related job displacement is misleading and overestimates the impact of AI thus far. Even AI leaders like Sam Altman are now backing away from their assertions that the technology would eliminate jobs en masse. At companies like JPMorgan Chase, AI-related productivity gains have led to significant job changes in some divisions but have not meaningfully reduced overall headcount or expenses. “We are preparing to make sure we can retrain our people,” CEO Jamie Dimon said recently. “We have had discrete areas where we did reduce jobs by 30% or 40%, and most of those people [were] offered jobs elsewhere.”
There is, however, evidence that entry level jobs are at risk: ZipRecruiter found that those jobs were particularly exposed and that nearly 40% of employers had started reassigning entry-level tasks—like data entry and processing—to AI. For almost a third of companies, AI has raised the bar for entry level candidates, a shift that echoes the experience of some young workers navigating the job market.
ZipRecruiter’s findings also captured another factor that might influence how employers talk about the effects of AI on their workforce. According to the survey, male respondents were more likely to say that AI would help create jobs at their company. This gender divide in how leaders think AI will impact jobs also reflects a broader split in sentiment between men and women. On the whole, women tend to be more skeptical of AI or worry about how it might impact them—and given they dominate some of the sectors that are most exposed to AI, it’s not hard to imagine why.
