The most powerful voices in artificial intelligence (AI) really want you to worry about your job—if you’re a white-collar worker. Microsoft AI chief Mustafa Suleyman predicts AI will cause office jobs to crumble in 18 months. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei thinks entry-level jobs in the space will be cut in half in a similar timeline. Even Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell has warned that AI is quietly impacting the labor market as job creation hovers close to zero.
But behind closed doors, business leaders controlling company headcounts are actually telling a more subtle story. A working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research found that, out of a survey of 750 chief financial officers from U.S. firms, less than half (44%) say they plan on some AI-related job cuts. When the co-authors calculated what that amounts to across the broader economy, they found just 0.4%, or about 502,000 roles out of about 125 million roles, are expected to be lost this year. Just about half of those job losses will come from the white-collar world.
