This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Employment increases when firms adopt AI, with more people recruited to senior roles at the expense of junior roles, according to a study from King's College London and Stanford University in the U.S. The study, which provides some of the first internationally comparable evidence of how AI is changing workforces, finds that firm-level AI adoption leads to around a 3.3% increase in the number of employees recruited overall.
The authors found that while senior employment increases by 6.7%, junior employment falls by 2.5%. The study analyzed 1.25 billion job advertisements and 158 million employee positions across 41 countries between 2016 and 2021. The researchers examined how firms change after adopting generative AI and found that while AI adoption is associated with a decline in the share of junior roles, demand for senior employees and workers in computer and mathematical occupations increased.
The researchers defined "adoption" based on job ads and categorized firms as adopters once they mentioned in their job ads that applicants would need to use genAI in their jobs. Most previous research on generative AI and labor markets has focused on individual countries, making it difficult to compare findings across economies. By applying a consistent methodology across 41 countries, the researchers were able to identify common patterns in how firms are adapting to AI.
Klein Teeselink, of the Faculty of Social Science and Public Policy at King's College London, said, "It's difficult to predict exactly which occupations new technologies will replace and which they will complement. And while this study doesn't fully settle that question, it does provide an indication of how firms are changing their workforce after adopting generative AI. "We find a similar pattern in many labor markets, with firms employing fewer junior workers and more senior employees after adopting AI." Bharat Chandar of Stanford University added, "This is the first global study of its kind and the findings suggest that generative AI is changing the mix of jobs within organizations rather than reducing overall employment.
It is interesting to note that we observed this trend globally, from the U.S. to Brazil to Saudi Arabia." Bharat Chandar et al, How Does AI Change Labor Demand? Evidence from 41 Countries, (2026). DOI: 10.2139/ssrn.7498743 Swati Mestri holds a bachelor's degree in Electronics Engineering and has worked as a content editor since 2019.
She has experience editing research documents across technology, health care, and materials science, and has a particular interest in technology and space. Full profile → Master's in physics with research experience. Long-time science news enthusiast.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
