95.7% of companies saw no AI impact on employment

Economist Alex Tabarrok analyzed data from the U.S. Census Bureau's Business Trends and Outlook Survey, showing that 95.7% of companies did not notice any AI impact on employment over the past six months, even though the share of firms using AI rose from 3.7% to 18%.

Compiled by Sergey KostenchukPublished 2026-08-31Updated 2026-09-18

2026-08-31 Business

💼 95.7% of companies saw no AI impact on employment

Economist Alex Tabarrok analyzed data from the U.S. Census Bureau's Business Trends and Outlook Survey (BTOS): when asked how AI affected their company's employment over the past six months, 2.3% answered "increased," 2.0% answered "decreased," and 95.7% answered "no change" — almost the same as two years ago.

🌍 The share of firms using AI rose from 3.7% to 18%, but the pressure is cumulative: among adopters, the share reporting the replacement of a "large number" of tasks rose from 2.4% to 7.1%, while 64% of adopters said nothing in their business changed.

👤 AI is not yet causing mass layoffs, but it is redistributing tasks: the main use case is letters and documents (85%), with only 13% for code, despite the hype around programming. The raw BTOS data is available on the Census Bureau website — the figures are easy to verify.

Source 1: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/08/ai-and-employment-what-the-firms-say.html Source 2: https://www.census.gov/hfp/btos/data

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