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While artificial intelligence<\/a> has caused turbulence in the labor market, the recent decline in job opportunities<\/a> has more to do with economic uncertainty, experts say.<\/p>\n \u201cAs we look across the broader labor market, we see that AI\u2019s impact on the labor market has still been fairly small,\u201d said Cory Stahle, a senior economist at Indeed, a job search site.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThe important asterisk is that that doesn\u2019t mean that it has been zero,\u201d he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n Mandi Woodruff-Santos, a career coach, agrees: \u201cI don\u2019t think AI is to blame, I think the economic uncertainty is to blame.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The job market has not been good<\/a> in recent months, whether you\u2019re looking for a job<\/a> or currently employed.<\/p>\n The U.S. economy added about 22,000 jobs<\/a> for the month of August, while the unemployment rate rose to 4.3%, according <\/a>to a Bureau of Labor Statistics report on Friday. Economists surveyed by Dow Jones had been looking for payrolls to rise by 75,000.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Of those who are still employed, some are \u201cjob hugging<\/a>,\u201d or \u201cholding onto their job for dear life,\u201d according to an August report<\/a> by Korn Ferry, an organizational consulting firm.<\/p>\n But others are \u201cquiet cracking<\/a>,\u201d which is a \u201cpersistent feeling of workplace unhappiness that leads to disengagement, poor performance, and an increased desire to quit,\u201d according to<\/a> cloud learning platform TalentLMS.<\/p>\n Growing economic uncertainty has kept workers from quitting their jobs and has led businesses to slow down hiring decisions<\/a>, experts say.<\/p>\n \u201cNo business knows what the heck the Trump administration is going to do next with the economy,\u201d said Woodruff-Santos. <\/p>\n \u201cAnd in this kind of economic climate, companies are not sure of anything, and so they\u2019re being very conservative with the way that they\u2019re hiring,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n While some companies have announced layoffs to pursue AI technologies in their organizations, most of the impact has been isolated in the tech industry, said Indeed\u2019s Stahle.\u00a0<\/p>\n Most recently, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said <\/a>the company laid off about 4,000 customer support roles, due to advancements in the company\u2019s use of artificial intelligence software.<\/p>\n Other studies show that AI has mostly affected younger workers rather than mid-career employees.\u00a0<\/p>\n An August report <\/a>by Stanford University professors found that early-career workers (ages 22 to 25) in the most AI-exposed occupations experienced a 13% decline in employment. On the flip side, employment for workers in less-exposed fields and more experienced workers in the same occupations has either stayed the same or grown.<\/p>\n The study also found that employment declines are concentrated in occupations \u201cwhere AI is more likely to automate rather than augment human labor.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n More from Personal Finance:<\/strong> Yet, the tech industry itself is not a large sector, said Stahle. According <\/a>to a March 2025 analysis by non-profit trade association CompTIA, or the Computing Technology Industry Association, \u201cnet tech employment\u201d made up about 5.8% of the overall workforce.<\/p>\n Net-tech employment is a designation that represents all those employed in the industry, including workers in technical positions such as cybersecurity and business professionals employed by technology companies, as well as full-time and self-employed technology workers.<\/p>\n For AI-driven layoffs to be considered a broad threat to the job market, the technology needs to start impacting other sectors, such as retail and marketing, said Stahle.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Some predictions on AI\u2019s workforce impact argue that employers may be more likely to retrain workers rather than lay them off, according <\/a>to a new report by the Brookings Institute, a public policy think tank.<\/p>\n \u201cAI may be more likely to augment rather than fully replace human workers,\u201d the authors wrote.<\/p>\nThe state of the job market<\/h2>\n
How artificial intelligence is impacting the labor force<\/h2>\n
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