The question everyone’s asking but nobody wants to answer honestly: Is AI coming for our jobs?
As the CEO of an AI company, I get some version of this question at every meeting, every conference, every dinner party, every family gathering.
The question underneath is always even more personal: Will I have work? Will my kids? The question is urgent. It’s real. And most people giving you answers to it haven’t examined the actual data.
I have.
Here’s what I can say for certain: We are creating conditions for an AI-driven labor crisis. Jobs are at risk. Hard data shows this. It also shows that career paths are changing and disappearing. The potential crisis is not the one you think, though, or at least it’s not the cause you think.
American workers, collectively, are paid about $11 trillion dollars per year.
AI is driving potentially massive labor disruptions (some of which are already underway) because we are not understanding the ways it impacts all levels of our businesses, we are missing the opportunity to cultivate new skills in our workforce, and ultimately not doing what we can to transform the way we do business.
The Numbers Everyone Gets Wrong
Here’s a basic scorecard:
- We have about 7.4 million job openings in the U.S. right now
- About 7.2 million people are unemployed and actively looking.
- That means there are about 200,000 more jobs than those seeking them.
Sounds good, right?
Not so fast. The real picture is that there are 212 million people able to work, by economists’ estimates (and a wider universe of 275 million working-age Americans).
