AI Adoption Is Driving Hiring, But Mostly for Senior Roles

Companies using artificial intelligence are adding more jobs than those that aren’t, but those gains sharply favor senior employees over junior workers, according to a new study spanning 41 countries.

The number of employees in senior positions rose by 6.7% over five years at companies adopting AI, while junior employment declined 3% in the same period, researchers Bharat Chandar of Stanford University and Bouke Klein Teeselink of King’s College London said in a paper released on Monday. Although overall hiring increased, the share of junior workers at those companies fell by 1.9 percentage points, they found. The shift away from lower-level workers occurred in numerous countries, including Brazil, Saudi Arabia and the UK.

“AI is labor saving for junior workers and labor expanding for seniors in exposed occupations,” the authors wrote. “Junior employment losses run somewhat deeper in richer and more digitized economies.”

The academics analyzed a sample of 1.25 billion job postings and 154 million employment records between January 2021 and March 2026.

They also found that employment for computer-related and mathematical roles, which are among the most exposed to AI, increased by 0.8 percentage points at companies that adopted AI. There, too, was a shift toward senior workers, the researchers added.

Chandar and his colleagues at the Stanford Digital Economy Lab wrote last month that employment among 22- to 25-year-olds in jobs that are highly exposed to AI is 19% below what it would be had it kept pace with less-exposed roles. That comes as young adults in the US grow increasingly concerned about AI-related job losses, Pew Research Center said in a report.

Still, concerns about job displacement caused by AI have been overshadowed this month by warnings from AI executives and employees over the risks the technology’s models poses to humans.

Photograph: Attendees at the Albany Job Fair in Latham, New York, US, on Wednesday, Oct. 2, 2024; photo credit: Angus Mordant/Bloomberg