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While there is still no clear answer to the question of how artificial intelligence influences gains and losses in the job market, there is at least one question about AI that job candidates and current workers hoping to stay in their jobs should be prepared to answer clearly in 2026.
“In many roles, the baseline will no longer be ‘Can one person do the job?’ but rather “Can they do it in a way that adds unique value beyond what AI can do alone and what people can do alone?” “, said Daniela Rus, director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT.
The evolving relationship between AI and human labor is a critical issue in the labor market, with the benefits of the technology beginning to show up in productivity data, at least anecdotally. Minneapolis Federal Reserve President Neel Kashkari said artificial intelligence was causing a slowdown in hiring at large companies and that many companies were seeing “real productivity gains.”
Kashkari told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” that the impact is mainly on large companies and, overall, he expects hiring and firing to remain weak in the labor market. But he added: “There are too many anecdotes of companies using this and seeing real productivity gains. The companies I talked to two years ago were skeptical and said, “No, we’re using it now.” » »
“I would say we are not hiring fewer people,” AMD CEO Lis Su told CNBC’s Jon Fortt from the CES conference in Las Vegas. “Frankly, we’re growing very significantly as a company, so we’re actually hiring a lot of people, but we’re hiring different people. We’re hiring people who are at the forefront of AI.”
Last year, the CEOs of Shopify, AccentureAnd Cinqrr are among examples of business leaders overseeing layoffs while urging employees to upskill or risk finding themselves less relevant in the job market.
Micha Kaufman, CEO of Fiverr, said that encouraging teams to “deepen their AI skills was not a token gesture.
Some of the ways companies talk about this shift remain vague, for example, AI handles repetitive or computationally heavy tasks so humans can focus on higher order tasks involving judgment, empathy, creativity, and context. This AI-enhanced view of human work, with technology in the background, represents “a shift from replacement to augmentation,” according to Rus.
But workers would be right to be skeptical.
“These transitions are about efficiency, but also about trust and transparency: workers will need to have confidence that companies are not using AI simply as an excuse to cut costs,” Rus said. She added that there is a risk that instead of amplifying uniquely human skills, the transition to AI will erode them.
Kaufman acknowledged that transparency from management cannot eliminate worker anxiety. “In learning to use AI, people might worry about training the tools that will replace them,” he said. “But I see something very different happening. The individuals who learn to guide AI, to interpret and improve its results, are not training their replacements; they are becoming the architects of the next generation of work,” he said.
Fiverr, which offers a platform connecting employers with freelancers, is at the forefront of AI adoption because it makes work easier where AI use is on the rise. According to his Independent Economic Impact Report 202440% of freelancers were already using AI tools, a usage that Kaufman said saved an average of more than eight hours per week. His research found that early adopters do better work and are better paid. “Those who have learned to integrate AI are not replaced by it; they thrive because of it,” he said.
A recent study from Yale’s Budget Lab provides some encouragement that the relationship between AI and employment so far is not that different from past periods of technological progress. It concluded that the labor market as a whole has not been disrupted since ChatGPT was released in late 2022, and that available data indicates that AI automation is not eroding demand for knowledge-based labor across the economy as a whole.
Budget Lab researchers cautioned that no results can be considered conclusive in the first few years of deploying a new technology, but they pointed to historical precedents, such as the introduction of the computer into offices, which show that “widespread technological disruption in workplaces tends to occur over decades, rather than months or years.”
“Even if new AI technologies continue to have as large, or even more dramatic, impact on the labor market, it is reasonable to expect that widespread effects will take longer to materialize,” the Yale report said.
A recent McKinsey study predicted that AI could “theoretically” automate more than half of current working hours in the United States, but added that this view does not necessarily mean job losses. “Some roles will diminish, others increase or change, while new ones will emerge – with work increasingly focused on collaboration between humans and intelligent machines,” its authors write.
McKinsey estimates that 70% of skills in demand in the job market are applicable to both automatable and non-automatable work. “This overlap means that most skills remain relevant, but how and where they are used will evolve,” the researchers wrote.
Companies that rely heavily on AI to replace their recruiting early on can also recalibrate based on experience.
Armando Solar-Lezama, professor of computer science at MIT and associate director at MIT CSAIL, cited the example of fintech Klarna, which transferred 40% of its workforce in a policy change focused on AI, only to have to rehire several customer service workers after poorer performance of the technology. “Some of these efforts may backfire,” Solar-Lezama said. But individual failures of AI in businesses shouldn’t bring too much comfort to workers across the economy. “Many of them will be successful and result in workforce reductions,” he said.
For all the workers currently worried about being tasked by their employers with training their replacement robots, Solar-Lezama said these are the organizations that could pay the highest price. In fact, human failure at work remains an irreplaceable skill in the workplace itself.
“It is important to note that AI systems do not learn in the same way as humans,” he said. “Existing organizations are designed to deal with the failure modes of humans, so they will fail if you simply replace those humans with AI systems. It will take time for companies to realize this,” he added.