Is AI taking jobs? Actual statistical data do not confirm the media buzz

"I will be fired and replaced by AI" is a fear of many white-collar workers, so let us look at the statistics without the TikTok drama: who in the developed countries has actually been fired and actually been replaced by AI agents.

1. Most of the world's media quotes a dubious figure from one single website

"Challenger, Gray & Christmas" is the name of a Illinois company that sells career consulting: it literally earns its money from layoffs. This very firm began publishing reports about "mass layoffs at companies due to AI."

They got insane traffic to their website, they are quoted by CNN, NBC, CBS News, - basically all the world's media, and it is precisely they who are responsible for launching the new global scare story about "AI is going to take my job".

Where does "Challenger, Gray & Christmas" get this data from in the first place? They do not disclose their methodology, but they have no access to real statistics from government bureaus.

The economist Matt Darling calculated that their report captures about 3% of all real layoffs.

With a high degree of probability, when you saw a headline on social media saying "23% of layoffs are happening because of AI", that is a quotation from the same HR blog - information that no one has verified.

Do you know where the truly mass layoffs are happening this year? The highest growth rate of mass layoffs this year is in transport: 387% year on year. Have you seen those discussions in the media? No, because nobody will click on a headline like that. Scare stories about the Terminator are another matter.

2. What do the real statistics on AI-related layoffs around the world show?

If you look at the real reports of the labour bureaus rather than at clickbait, then we see the following: the adoption of AI does not reduce the number of vacancies, it increases it.

• Those companies that adopt AI increase the number of vacancies, even if not by much, by 4%. This is data from the European Central Bank: firms with intensive use of AI are roughly 4% more likely to be growing their headcount than cutting it.
• Pricewaterhouse Coopers: the premium for employees for additional command of AI skills is growing, over the past year from 57% to 62%. This is not a survey done on somebody's knee: a billion job advertisements across 27 countries were analysed.

At the same time changes in the labour market are happening, they are simply of a different kind. A disruptive technology is clearly reshaping the structure of the staff in offices around the world.

• We have a growing number of vacancies of a completely new type: the specialist at the junction of humanities knowledge and AI. For example, the marketing engineer, the design engineer, the UX engineer.

Not simply a marketer, but a marketer with engineering LLM skills, who can build with his own hands a dozen AI agents for the corporation, which do not replace him but complement and reinforce him.

3. It is advantageous for company management to blame layoffs on AI. This phenomenon is called AI washing

Nobody wants to admit that they are laying people off because the business is developing badly. Layoffs because of AI are another matter, that sounds technological. "We are laying off employees not because our business is collapsing, but because we have flown off into technological outer space! Super-robots now do the work of seven people."

(Anyone who has actually configured those very "robots" with his own hands knows that without human supervision, human-in-the-loop, nothing works in AI at all. Do not believe the fairy tales of the info-business salesmen.)

It is not only I who say this.

If you are laying people off without a mature, ready-to-go AI agent to do the work, you are not laying off people because of AI.

The companies that are laying off are not struggling.

The real reason for the layoffs in 2025-2026 is the pullback after the post-covid overstaffing.

Andreessen is one of the most successful businessmen in Silicon Valley. His estimate of the scale of the overstaffing is up to 75% of the headcount, and he directly calls AI the silver-bullet excuse.

A telling case is the Swedish company Klarna, which loudly replaced the work of 700 people with an AI assistant, and then went and hired people back.