The AI Threat to Your Hiring Plan Isn’t the One Making Headlines
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Joseph Briggs, Goldman’s senior global economist, owns that scary number. He estimates the AI transition could displace more than 9% of the workforce over ten years, roughly 15 million workers. He also expects it to be temporary. Spread across a full decade, in an economy that already creates and destroys 25 to 35 million jobs a year, Briggs says the unemployment rate probably rises by less than a point. In his own words: “Despite our expectation that AI-related job losses will lead to a meaningful amount of labor displacement, we continue to expect that labor market headwinds will be temporary.”
MIT’s Daron Acemoglu, a Nobel laureate in economics, is far more measured. He estimates job losses of 2% to 4% over the next five years, concentrated in white-collar work that’s cognitive and routine, customer service reps and back-office roles, roughly 8 to 9 million people, or 5% of the workforce. He expects the real signal to show up in 2027 as layoffs or hiring slowdowns spread through those roles. “No general law of economics says that job creation must match job destruction,” he said.
MIT’s Neil Thompson calls the pattern a rising tide, not a crashing wave. His key stat: only 10% to 20% of S&P 500 firms are currently using AI in ways that generate revenue. Capability and adoption are two different things, and adoption is moving slowly.
Then there’s what Goldman can already measure. Economist Elsie Peng finds AI has trimmed about 16,000 jobs a month from payroll growth over the past year and added roughly 0.1 point to the unemployment rate. Small, for now. Entry-level workers are absorbing the worst of it: the unemployment gap between entry-level and experienced workers in AI-exposed jobs has widened 0.6 points. Only 2% of S&P 500 companies tied AI productivity gains to actual Q1 earnings, even as Amazon, Meta, IBM, Salesforce, Verizon, and others have all announced cuts naming AI directly.
Read the whole thing and one pattern jumps out: the loudest apocalypse predictions tend to come from people selling the technology, and the most cautious voices belong to the economists closest to the actual data.
The finding I’d act on if I ran a hiring team is Peng’s entry-level number. The damage from this transition is landing unevenly, concentrated on the bottom rung of the white-collar ladder, the customer service, back-office, and junior analyst roles that companies used to hand new graduates. Oracle’s 21,000-job cut and Microsoft’s reported round of consulting and sales cuts to help fund its AI spending both fit that pattern. Acemoglu expects it to get more visible in 2027, and nothing in this report gives me a reason to doubt him.
Here’s the part I keep coming back to. Acemoglu says AI is replacing more of the workforce than it’s complementing right now, and that’s a choice companies are making, not a law of physics. The tools that help a worker do more are worth building. The ones aimed purely at removing the worker create a short-term cost cut and a longer-term skills hole. Companies gutting their entry-level pipeline to save money this year are going to be short on mid-level talent to promote in five.
Nobody in this report actually knows whether this time is different. Anyone telling you they’re certain, in either direction, is guessing. For employers, the practical move holds regardless of which economist turns out to be right: protect the roles that build your bench, and get help filling the ones that don’t need to disappear just because they can be automated.
Consumers Say Jobs Are the Hardest to Get Since 2021, and a Leading Index Agrees
The Conference Board’s Employment Trends Index fell to 106.69 in June, down from a revised 106.90 in May, the second straight monthly decline. The ETI is a leading indicator, so when it drops, payroll growth tends to slow in the months after. Jannik Schulz, an economic research associate at The Conference Board, put it plainly: “The ETI declined a second consecutive month in June, suggesting slower payroll growth ahead.”
The reading to sit with is the share of consumers who say jobs are hard to get. It rose to 22.5% in June, the highest level since January 2021. Initial jobless claims climbed for a second straight month to a 222,000 average, the largest monthly average recorded so far this year. Those two numbers, plus weaker real manufacturing and trade sales, dragged the index down.
Five of the eight components pushed in the other direction. Temp help hiring rose again in June and is up 47,800 for the first half of the year, a genuine green shoot, since staffing is usually one of the first things a company adds when it’s getting ready to hire and one of the first things it cuts when it isn’t. Job openings stayed elevated for a third straight month. Involuntary part-time work eased to 17.1% from 17.4%.
The Conference Board’s own label for the environment is “low hire, low fire,” meaning companies are holding steady on both hiring and cutting. Low hire, low fire steadiness is exactly why the consumer sentiment number matters more than usual right now. People sense a tightening market before it shows up in the payroll count, and workers are telling The Conference Board they feel it. The AI anxiety I covered a couple weeks back is part of the same mood.
Staffing your team doesn’t have to be hard.
Reach out and see how we can help.
84% of Hiring Small Businesses Can’t Find a Qualified Applicant
NFIB’s June Jobs Report shows the same tension as the ETI: demand for workers climbing while the applicant pool stays broken. The Small Business Employment Index sat at 100.2 in June, essentially flat from May’s 100.3 and the fourth straight monthly decline. It’s below the 2025 average of 101.2 but still a touch above the long-run average of 100.0.
62% of owners said they were hiring or trying to hire in June, up 7 points from May. 32% had job openings they couldn’t fill, up 3 points. Demand for workers is climbing again.
The applicant pool is the wall. 51% of all owners, 84% of everyone actually hiring, reported few or no qualified applicants. 24% had zero qualified applicants at all. Labor quality or availability jumped back to the top of the worry list, named by 19% of owners as their single biggest problem, up 6 points from May.
Here’s the detail that separates a talent shortage from a demand problem. Labor cost pressure eased at the same time. Only 8% of owners called labor costs their top problem, down 6 points from a record high in May, and the share raising pay dropped to a net 28%, the lowest reading of the year. “Main Street job openings are starting to pick up after a decline in May,” said NFIB Chief Economist Bill Dunkelberg. “While more small businesses are looking to hire, many owners still cannot find qualified workers.”
Fewer owners raising wages, alongside a shortage of qualified applicants, points to a skills gap rather than a bodies gap. There are applicants. They don’t match the work being posted.
If you’re a small business owner staring at that 84% figure, widening the funnel on skills you can train and moving faster on the candidates who do qualify beats waiting for a resume that isn’t coming. A staffing partner is built to close exactly that gap, and if you’re one of the workers on the other side of this, trying to find a role that actually fits, here’s what’s currently open.
