new York
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Many workers fear that artificial intelligence will attack their jobs, an idea supported by warnings from AI leaders and anecdotes from a recent Federal Reserve report.
Yet new research reveals otherwise – at least for now.
Jobs with high exposure to AI automation are growing faster than before Covid-19 – even faster than all other occupations, according to Avant-garde.
The findings don’t necessarily signal a clear signal to workers worried about AI disrupting their careers. Some companies recently announced they were eliminating certain positions because AI could automate entry-level workers’ tasks or make current workers more efficient.
Yet there is no evidence that technology is causing significant harm, at least not yet.
“At a high level, we haven’t seen evidence that positions exposed to AI are experiencing a decline in employment,” Adam Schickling, senior economist at Vanguard, told CNN in a phone interview.
Vanguard’s analysis focused on about 140 occupations that it considers most vulnerable to replacement by AI, including clerical workers, typists, HR assistants, lawyers and data scientists.
These are jobs with the largest share of work hours performing tasks that AI systems could potentially automate with a high degree of autonomy.
In other words, these are the positions most likely to decline as AI explodes.
But that doesn’t happen. Not necessarily because AI does not pose a long-term threat to jobs, but because the technology is simply not good enough yet.
In fact, Vanguard found that employment among occupations with high exposure to AI increased by 1.7% during the post-Covid period, from mid-2023 to mid-2025.
This is a faster pace for these jobs than the 1% increase recorded during the pre-Covid period (2015 to 2019).
In contrast, job growth has slowed for all other occupations, according to Vanguard.
Schickling said he deliberately did not compare recent employment trends with the 2020-2022 period because it was a very unusual time in the job market, making it an inappropriate benchmark.
Vanguard found similar results for salaries.
Occupations with high exposure to AI experienced real (inflation-adjusted) wage growth of just 0.1% pre-Covid, according to Vanguard. But this figure accelerated to reach 3.8% in the post-Covid period.
In comparison, all other occupations less exposed to AI experienced a smaller acceleration in real wage growth, from 0.5% pre-Covid to 0.7% post-Covid.
This finding is surprising. If AI really hurts the job market, it should translate into lower wages.
“While AI may have begun to change our workflows, its role in explaining the recent slowdown in job growth is overstated,” Vanguard said in the analysis.
All of this data contrasts with the doomsday warnings of some economists and CEOs, including AI leaders.
In May, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warned that AI could eliminate half of all entry-level jobs in white-collar professions, driving the unemployment rate up to 20% in the near future.
“It’s strange how fully aware the general public, politicians and legislators, I don’t think, are of what’s going on,” Amodei told CNN’s Anderson Cooper. “We need to act now. We can’t sleepwalk through this.”
Even some research from the Federal Reserve shows that AI is starting to impact the job market.
For example, the November Fed Beige Booka compilation of anecdotes from companies across the country, said that “a few companies noted that artificial intelligence was replacing entry-level positions or making existing workers productive enough to dampen new hires.”
By leveraging AI tools and automation, one manufacturer reduced the size of its office staff by 15%, the Cleveland Fed said.
“Many contacts noted that even modest AI deployments would allow them to fail to fill certain jobs or avoid a recruiting class of entry-level workers,” the Philadelphia Fed wrote in the Beige Book.
Vanguard’s analysis focused on entry-level workers, a group that has faced an increasingly difficult time finding work in today’s job market.
If AI disproportionately harmed younger workers, it would show up in Vanguard’s internal data on the 5 million participants in 401(k) plans administered by the company.
But Schickling said that’s not the case. The share of workers aged 21 to 25 enrolled in Vanguard 401(K) remains relatively high.
Some tech leaders have pushed back against pessimism about AI stealing jobs.
President of Cisco Jeetu Patel told CNN in August, the “stupidest thing a company can do” in the long term is refuse to hire entry-level workers because of AI.
“I reject the idea that humans are going to be obsolete in about five years, that we’re going to have nothing to do and we’re going to sit on the beach,” Patel told Ai4, an AI conference in Las Vegas.
So why isn’t AI playing a bigger role in today’s job market?
Schickling said this could be because some AI models still struggle with issues such as hallucinations.
“I am perpetually surprised and amazed by the capabilities of AI, but also by how these models can sometimes be wrong,” he said. “It’s clear that AI still has limits.”
The risk, of course, is that as AI tools advance at breakneck speed, the danger to human jobs also increases. Schickling acknowledges there will be employment disruptions.
For example, Vanguard expects customer service representatives, data scientists, paralegals and other occupations to experience a decline in demand for human workers due to technology.
Among the professions most exposed to AI? Economists.
“If the models continue to improve exponentially, it could pose a greater threat to me personally,” Schickling said.