📝 usncan Note: AI Kills Jobs, Says Stanford Study, At Least In These Circumstances
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AI is causing job loss for younger workers in vulnerable occupations, a Stanford study finds.
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AI is actually cutting employment in the United States, according to a years-long study by Stanford researchers spanning millions of workers over thousands of companies. The hardest-hit areas: entry-level employment in occupations where AI automates tasks rather than augments them.
In other words, AI is toughest on the young.
“We find that since the widespread adoption of generative AI, early-career workers (ages 22-25) in the most AI-exposed occupations have experienced a 13% relative decline in employment,” Stanford researchers Erik Brynjolfsson, Bharat Chandar, and Ruyu Chen say in an introduction to the study.
Those most-exposed occupations include software development and customer service.
The study used data from ADP, the largest US payroll processor, to analyze employment patterns from January 2021 through July 2025. Through this period, overall employment grew, but employment growth among young workers began to stagnate starting in late 2022. ChatGPT was released to the public in November of 2022, part of a growing swell in AI innovation that has continued and accelerated since then.
Younger workers are disproportionately impacted by AI-driven job loss.
Stanford
There are now scores of AI software development tools like GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Replit, CodeGPT, Bolt, Amazon Q Developer, and all the major AI engines like ChatGPT and Claude also support computer code generation. And a search for “AI customer service” on popular business software comparison site G2 returns over 1,800 results.
“The AI revolution is beginning to have a significant and disproportionate impact on entry-level workers in the American labor market,” the researchers say.
The key factor in whether AI kills jobs, however, is how it is applied.
Employment declines are concentrated in occupations where AI automates tasks, rather than augmenting them, the study says. In fact, in occupations or roles where AI augments tasks, entry-level employment remained stable or even grew.
A key factor: the rate of improvement in AI tools.
As the study shares, AI systems could solve just 4.4% of coding problems a widely used benchmark in 2023, but hit 71.7% in 2024. That’s a staggering rate of improvement.
Some good news: where AI is being used to augment work instead of replace workers, it’s not having a downward impact on wages, the study says. Also, some jobs are more resistant to AI-driven job loss.
Some jobs are more resistant to AI-driven job loss.
Stanford
Lower AI-exposure jobs typically involve tasks that AI cannot easily do, such as caring for others, physical activities, or jobs that require interpersonal interaction or creative skills.
Jobs, however, that are lower-end and rely more on rules and codified knowledge are easier to replace.
Of course, AI is getting better and better very quickly. So it’s a bad bet to take that AI won’t be able to do more and more jobs and tasks over the coming months and years.
