Fears of AI-related job loss grow every time another company announces round of layoffs. Until May 2026, the companies announced that about 90,000 job cuts were linked to AI and by some accounts up to 15% of US jobs are linked projected be eliminated by AI for the next five years. The tech industry’s promises that AI will also create new jobs do little to ease fears, especially for the generation wondering if anyone will hire when they graduate.
A recent report from Ramp and Revelio Labs, which track enterprise AI spending and workforce records for nearly 22,000 companies, respectively, complicates that bleak narrative.
The report found that companies that spend heavily on AI are growing their workforce more quickly, even in entry-level positions that many fear are doomed to fail. According to the report, “high-intensity adopters” (companies spending an average of $30 per employee per month on AI in the first three months) saw a 10.2% headcount increase.
Staffing also increased across all functions, including engineeringsales, administration, customer service, finance, marketing and scientific functions. The largest employment growth among high-intensity adopters occurred in the information sector, which includes software, Internet, media, and technology-adjacent businesses.
Despite these positive signs, the data is not as optimistic as it seems. It leans heavily toward tech and knowledge work companies, those that might have venture capital backing and are growing rapidly anyway, making it difficult to say whether AI is helping hiring or simply showing up at companies that are expanding anyway.
“This article does not show that AI universally creates jobs,” the article’s authors admit, “but it contradicts claims that AI will lead to large job losses.”
It also contradicts claims that AI is killing all junior jobs. Recent research Goldman Sachs found that AI has already eliminated about 16,000 net jobs per month over the past year, with Generation Z and entry-level workers bearing the brunt of the burden. But at advanced tech companies, the report finds that entry-level staffing actually increased by 12%.
So what can we get out of this? Perhaps AI is not always a tool for labor substitution, but rather it can be a tool for business expansion.
“For software and technology companies, AI can make core production cheaper or faster to produce: writing code, debugging, creating internal tooling, producing technical documentation, and supporting product development,” the report reads. “Lower production costs in these workflows can increase the return on expansion for the entire company, not just the engineering team.”
But companies that buy subscriptions and run pilots, but haven’t made sustained investments, don’t tend to see any increases in headcount, according to the report.
This creates the potential for a widening gap between companies that have the resources (such as capital, technical staff, founder networks, and management bandwidth) to turn AI adoption into real business profits and those that are stuck experimenting with subscriptions. In other words, this report suggests that companies that already have the resources are the ones that will see the biggest gains.
The article’s authors speculate that that divide could continue to grow, saying, “Companies without those channels may be left behind.”
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