- Highly exposed occupations are seeing less wage growth due to AI productivity gains
- 5.8 million US workers are considered to be working in these roles
- The impacts could lead to reduced living standards
While sceptics have been warning of mass layoffs for years, a new report reveals that AI could actually be leading to weaker wage growth instead of human replacement.
US wage growth is already slowing compared with inflation, and a new study by Apollo Global Management has proposed that AI could be to blame.
According to the data, real wage growth in highly exposed occupations has been around 6.7 percentage points lower than less-exposed occupations since 2023, while employment itself is largely no different.
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The white paper estimates that 5.8 million US workers, or around 3.7% of the US labor force, works in highly exposed jobs, and this is on the basis of earlier Anthropic work whereby at least half of the job’s tasks can be replaced by Anthropic’s AI tools.
“Companies are capturing AI productivity gains through wage compression rather than workforce reduction,” Chief Economist Torsten Slok suggested. In other words, workers are getting more work done thanks to AI, so demand for additional labor has fallen and workers’ bargaining powers have weakened.
Apollo estimates the effects of this could translate to around $28 billion in lost annual labor income, but this could be on the conservative side.
Crucially, Apollo’s analysis shows that AI is more likely to be affecting the price of labor rather than the quantity of labor as human-AI hybrid workforces become more common.
Looking ahead, Apollo is warning that “profound implications for income inequality and living standards” could threaten workers globally.
While the research doesn’t offer specific remedies, it does point toward government involvement and policymaking in order to slow down how quickly the transition happens and to offer greater support to impacted workers.
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