AI impact broadly underwhelms

Returning to a measure we introduced in 2023, we examine American data on employment by occupation, singling out the type of workers that are often believed to be vulnerable to ai. These are white-collar employees, describing people in back-office support, financial operations, sales and much more besides. There is a similar pattern here: we find no evidence of an ai hit (see chart 2). Quite the opposite, in fact. In the past year the share of employment in white-collar work has risen very slightly.

Perhaps boards of companies are responding more to macro-ecnomic trends and not AI itself. The closing line of ‘for now there is no need to panic’ is less reassuring. I worry less about the next 18 months as I do about the 5 year horizon. If AI is improving producitivty that is fewer jobs in the future. Guess we’ll find out together.

_{Quote Citation: The Economist, “Why AI hasn’t taken your job: And any jobs-pocalypse seems a long way off”, May 26th 2025, https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2025/05/26/why-ai-hasnt-taken-your-job}