Fears that artificial intelligence will eliminate jobs grow each time another company announces layoffs. Through May 2026, companies announced nearly 90,000 job cuts tied to AI, and by some accounts, up to 15% of U.S. jobs are projected to be eliminated by AI over the next five years. Promises from the tech industry that AI will also create new jobs do little to ease fears, especially for the generation wondering if anyone will be hiring when they graduate.
High AI spenders are hiring more workers
A recent report from Ramp and Revelio Labs, which track enterprise AI spend and workforce records from nearly 22,000 companies respectively, complicates that gloomy narrative. The report found that companies spending heavily on AI are growing headcount faster, even in entry-level roles that many fear are doomed. According to the report, 'high-intensity adopters' — firms that spend on average $30 per employee per month on AI in the first three months — saw headcount increase 10.2%. Among those companies, entry-level headcount rose by 12%, countering the rhetoric that AI kills junior jobs.
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Job growth spans all business functions
Headcount also rose across functions, including engineering, sales, administration, customer service, finance, marketing, and scientist roles. The strongest job growth among high-intensity adopters was in the information sector, which includes software, internet, media, and tech-adjacent firms. Despite these positive signals, the data is not as rosy as it seems. It skews heavily towards tech-forward, knowledge-work firms — ones that might have VC-backing and are growing fast anyway, making it difficult to say whether AI is contributing to the hiring or just showing up at companies that are expanding anyway. The report's authors admit: 'This paper does not show that AI universally creates jobs, but it does counter claims that AI will lead to broad job losses.' A recent Boston University study found that treating AI as a 'coworker' reduces error detection by 18%, suggesting that AI integration requires careful approach. Read more here.
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AI as a tool for firm expansion, not just substitution
The report suggests that AI is not always a tool for labor substitution, but can be a tool for firm expansion. 'For software and technology firms, AI can make core output cheaper or faster to produce: writing code, debugging, building internal tools, producing technical documentation, and supporting product development,' the report reads. 'Lower production costs in these workflows can raise the return to expanding the whole firm, not just the engineering team.' But companies that buy subscriptions and run pilots, yet did not go on to make sustained investments, do not tend to see any gains in headcount. That sets up the potential for a widening gap between firms that have the resources — capital, technical staff, founder networks, and management bandwidth — to turn AI adoption into actual business gains and those that are stuck experimenting with subscriptions. The authors speculate such a divide may continue to grow, saying: 'Firms without those channels may fall behind.' For more on AI's impact on employment, see the Wikipedia page.
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Source: https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/29/the-ai-jobs-debate-just-got-messier
