Will artificial intelligence destroy millions of jobs, and leave American workers adrift in a virtual quagmire? Those predictions have gained a lot of traction over the last few years as AI platforms have emerged, although right now those appear to be creating jobs … in the tort industry. The AI jobpocalypse has been perpetually predicted to be right around the corner.
What if those predictions have gotten it wrong? Axios reports today that the development of these AI platforms has had the opposite effect, both on job creation and wages, as investments pour into the tech platforms of today and tomorrow:
Here’s something to tell the AI doomers: There’s new evidence that instead of bringing on a job apocalypse, AI is creating more work, and, yes, jobs.
Why it matters: There’s a more nuanced and optimistic story at play when it comes to AI and the workplace.
The latest: The fund giant Vanguard has released an intriguing analysis finding that both wage and job growth increased over the past two years in the occupations most exposed to AI, compared with those with less exposure.
- A separate survey, meanwhile, found that most institutional investors and CEOs expect AI to drive an increase in hiring across all levels in 2026.
Expectations are one thing. What has happened in reality? Vanguard has conducted a deep dive on Department of Labor data to analyze how AI has impacted the industries with the highest exposure to AI-driven labor shifts. That has been primarily in the tech and data sectors, understandably, as AI replaces human-driven calculations on spreadsheets and databases. AI won’t have much impact on the trades, clearly, and will have more of an augmentation role in other service industries such as retail, health care, education, and other areas of employment.
The impact thus far on those high-exposure industries has been surprising, and perhaps illuminating:
Real wages increased 3.8% in the occupations with the highest AI exposure from the second quarter of 2023 to the second quarter of 2025, compared with 0.7% in all other occupations.
Job growth was up 1.7%, compared with a 0.8% gain.
Does this prove that AI will lead to a jobs nirvana rather than a jobpocalypse? Not exactly. In the first place, this looks more like correlative data rather than anything that firmly establishes causation. Job growth in the high-tech industry has usually been above-the-line in relation to other sectors, and the massive investments into AI will have amplified that trend all on its own. That investment stampede could also explain the higher-than-average gain in real wages, especially considering the demand created for a limited supply of skilled specialists in these fields that the investment created.
Even if one discounted the correlative aspects of this data, another issue emerges. All of this data comes from the process of building these AI platforms rather than fully integrating them into the economy. We would expect to see a boost in hiring and wages in these areas while the platforms get built, tuned up, and then integrated throughout the economy. Once they are built and integrated, the impact on job creation could be different, and perhaps much different. It will take far less investment to maintain and incrementally develop these AI engines than it took to build them in the first place, after all.
Perhaps the best news that comes from this analysis is a reminder of the limits to AI and its replacement capacities. AI may drive changes in how businesses operate, but can’t replace people except perhaps in the sectors that birth it. Even then, though, the shift will likely look more akin to the buggy-whip industry shifting to tire manufacturing at the advent of the age of the personal automobile. As the tech sector adopts AI for human-performed tasks of the moment, other opportunities will open up within the AI-dominated tech world for skilled professionals.
In a sense, the panic over AI seems to parallel panics over Peak Oil, climate change, the population bomb, and so on. There may be rational concerns over the impacts on job creation, but the panic will almost certainly prove irrational – as may be true of the rosy “AI jobs boom” take.
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