The AI Job Apocalypse: “It ain’t real!”

a great question uh so topical on everybody's mind i don't think so i really don't and i'm not just saying that because i'm a ceo of a staffing company but i really don't think so i think it's insane to me actually that people say that i mean you look at the four largest hyperscalers uh microsoft amazon meta and google they're all going to spend this year close to 800 billion dollars on building out ai Last year, they spent collectively over $400 billion.

Any time the U.S. economy has gone through some sort of major technological shift, let's talk about electrification first around the turn of the century, the PC revolution, the Internet, now AI.

what is spent to bring that about is it by two to three percent of gdp and gdp today is 31 trillion so let's call that six or seven six or seven trillion uh it's going to be spent on ai to bring that about like that's got to go somewhere where does that go that that does that all just get used on compute no a lot of that gets used to build out what this is and what this is going to look like And that's not going to be done in a Saturday.

That's going to be done over the course of probably five to 10 years.

And that money has to go somewhere.

And it is going to go somewhere in the form of jobs.

Will there be jobs that are disrupted and lost? And are there CEOs out there that are already talking about, oh, we're going to lay off all of our people because of it? Yes.

They think it's good for earnings.

But no, there is so much spending happening to bring about AI, not to mention all the productivity benefits that will come from it, that I think it's ridiculous to think that we're going to have all of a sudden mass job loss and sustained 10% unemployment, and we're just going to all be like the people from Wall-E at the end, just sucking on our 32-inch big gulps and vegging out all day.

I was really thinking about those people this morning.

I just don't think that's in store for us.

We have stats to

verify that too.

I grabbed Derek, our president of recruiting beforehand.

I was like, all right, give me some good stats that I can actually use to make sure that I'm anchored in reality too.

I know that our company has been growing, but what does the demand look like out there? And we are up on openings, which is our signal of, okay, are people actually hiring? Are our customers hiring? We're up 23% year over year.

And specifically with software jobs in particular, we're seeing those grow double digit growth from 24 to 25.

And then again, from 2025 to 2026, we're seeing double digit growth.

And of course, some roles are going down, like project managers are flat to a little bit down.

Some of the infrastructure roles are down slightly.

So of course, some roles I think are going to be impacted, but on the whole, Apocalypse, I think, is definitely a dramatic term for it.