According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 178,000 up-to-date jobs entered the U.S. labor market in March, a slight change from the previous month.
Anemic growth job postings are due to volatile changes in White House policy, rising energy prices due to the United States and Israel’s war with Iran, and, according to recent research, disruptions in the labor market caused by artificial intelligence.
Advocates of artificial intelligence and vast language models say the technology will create an economic boom thanks to its promise of breakthrough productivity solutions.
However, as artificial intelligence becomes more integrated into everyday business operations, the gap between promises of growth and efficiency and reality is widening.
Artificial intelligence hinders employment growth
On March 6, Marc Andreessen, venture capitalist and co-founder of Netscape, said on X that concerns about AI job displacement are overblown.
He also published an article in Business Insider stating that, at least in the tech industry, the number of job offers is increasing. Citing data from TrueUp, a tech job tracker, Business Insider found that the number of job postings at tech companies has doubled since 2023, to 67,000.
However, open positions do not necessarily translate into employment. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the biggest job gains in March were not in the technology industry. Of the 178,000 up-to-date jobs in addition in March, 76,000 were employed in the health service, 26,000 in construction, 21,000 in transport and warehousing, and 14,000 in social assistance.
While the report does not include a single section dedicated to the technology industry, related services such as computing infrastructure providers and internet search portals saw their employment decline by 1,500 or almost no change, respectively. Computer systems design and related services resulted in 13,000 job losses.
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According to a recent report by Goldman Sachs, artificial intelligence has actually shed 16,000 jobs per month over the past year. quoted by Fortuna. In particular, artificial intelligence has led to a breakdown in recruitment for entry-level positions. A 2025 study by SignalFire found that hiring of up-to-date graduates was taking place dropped 50% compared to pre-COVID-19 levels.
“The doors to technology once opened wide for new graduates. Today, they are barely ajar. The industry’s obsession with hiring bright graduates right out of college clashes with new realities: smaller funding rounds, shrinking teams, fewer new graduate programs and the rise of artificial intelligence,” the SignalFire study said.
This disruption could have repercussions far into the future. According to to Goldman Sachs: “AI-driven displacement could impose lasting costs on affected workers, worsening labor market outcomes for several years.”
“A key mechanism behind these poorer outcomes is occupational attrition. Workers displaced by technology are more likely to move into more routine jobs requiring fewer analytical and interpersonal skills, likely because the same technological changes that eliminated their jobs have also eroded the value of their existing skills.” further.
The job losses are justified by the theory that artificial intelligence will at least make jobs more productive. But even that is not a given.
The reality of AI utilize clashes with executives’ expectations
Managers still overwhelmingly support AI. According to Harvard Business Review, 80% of leaders report weekly utilize artificial intelligence, with 74% reporting positive gains after early implementation.
But employees don’t feel the same. Research conducted by HR consulting company Mercer found that 43% of employees find their job more frustrating.
One of the main problems is the number of errors made by generative AI. “For every 10 hours of productivity gained from AI, almost four hours are lost repairing its performance” – Workday report he stated.
Artificial intelligence can also be used to offload work to colleagues, which is what researchers at Harvard Business Review have in mind called “workslope”, i.e. “content that appears polished but lacks real substance, shifting cognitive work to co-workers.”
They found that “41% of employees have encountered such AI-generated outputs, costing nearly two hours of rework per instance and causing issues with productivity, trust, and collaboration further down the supply chain.”
According to Workday, only 14% of survey respondents said they “consistently achieve net positive results by using AI.”
Some of the gap between executives’ understanding of AI and reality at the manufacturing level can be explained by the technology itself.
According to Harvard Business Review, “Senior leaders typically use AI for high-level synthesis, strategic design, and decision support, tasks for which technology performs well, so current capabilities tend to benefit their work.”
For more cluttered, day-to-day operations like “workflows that have taken years to build, teams with uneven technical comfort, results that need to be consistently good, not just fast,” this doesn’t work very well.
“When a tool works, both groups understand and benefit. When it fails, usually only one of them has to deal with the consequences.”
Brian Solis, head of global innovation at enterprise AI company ServiceNow, he said that this division has created an “AI tax”, i.e. “More checking. More rework. More anxiety. Faster pace. AI decline. Less trust.”
Andreessen may not believe the AI job cuts narrative is true, but OpenAI does. The artificial intelligence company has admitted that the technology is having an impact on employment, and even has it released a series of policy proposals to address this problem.
The list includes “deliberately early and groundbreaking” ideas that serve as “a starting point for a discussion in which we invite others.” It includes proposals to expand healthcare coverage, retirement savings and establish a up-to-date industrial policy agenda.
Far from hopeful, Andreessen’s OpenAI proposal included a warning: “If policy fails to keep pace with technological change, the institutions and security networks needed to deliver this transformation may be left behind.”
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