The panic is loud. Barely a week passes without a headline about artificial intelligence (AI) eliminating jobs, gutting white-collar careers, and reshaping the U.S. economy at a pace no one can keep up with. But Erika McEntarfer, a labor economist at Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research in California and former Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), thinks it’s worth checking what the numbers actually say before drawing conclusions.

“I find facts are a lovely reality check on vibes,” McEntarfer told HRD America.

She’s been digging into the data and the research on AI’s labor market impact since her time leading the BLS, when she was asked about AI constantly during visits to Federal Reserve banks and data respondents across the country. Two years ago, she says, there wasn’t much to go on. Now there is.

Her overall read? The disruption is real in some corners, but it isn’t the broad catastrophe the headlines suggest.

“The available evidence to date suggests that AI’s impact on current labor market conditions is likely small right now,” McEntarfer said. “You can cut the data a million ways and mostly what you get is evidence of steady trends.”

That assessment is consistent with data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s Business Trends and Outlook Survey showing that only about one in five American companies are currently using AI in any business function, a figure that helps explain why broad labor market disruption hasn’t materialized yet.

Where are the job losses?

When you break down the unemployment data by which jobs are most exposed to AI, a counterintuitive pattern emerges. Yes, unemployment has been rising as the labor market softens, but it hasn’t been rising fastest among workers in AI-exposed fields.

“If anything, there’s evidence that it’s rising fastest among workers who are the least exposed to AI,” McEntarfer said.

According to McEntarfer, software developers — the classic example of an AI-exposed occupation — have actually seen steady, continued employment growth — a trend HRD America has been tracking as AI-driven tech job cuts are reshaping what HR leaders must do.

Researchers are currently debating whether software development jobs are growing as fast as they were before AI arrived, not whether they’re disappearing altogether.

“It’s not a story of mass displacements,” McEntarfer said. “What the aggregate trends are telling us is hiring has continued to happen apace.”

The aggregate hiring trends, explored in HRD America's analysis of how the May jobs report signals a tougher road ahead for hiring, points to a slowdown driven by factors well beyond AI.

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