Mass Unemployment Because of AI?... Deloitte Says "Too Soon to Tell"

Weakening Employment in Advanced Economies Attributed to Interest Rates and Inflation
U.S. White-Collar Jobs Have Instead Increased by 3 Million

Amid ongoing concerns that artificial intelligence (AI) will trigger large-scale unemployment, a new outlook has emerged that new technologies are instead creating new jobs, making a bleak future less likely.

In its weekly global economic review released on the 21st under the title "Is AI Causing Unemployment?", Deloitte stated, "It is uncertain whether AI will plunge the entire labor market into turmoil and bring about a shock in which jobs disappear altogether." It added, "Judging from the pattern so far, it is more appropriate to see this time as 'the same as before' rather than 'different this time'."

On the 27th of last month, job seekers who participated in the "2026 Public Institution Recruitment Information Fair" held at the Korea Agro-Fisheries & Food Trade Corporation (aT) Center in Seocho-gu, Seoul, visited the National Health Insurance Service to obtain employment information.

The report analyzed that, although unemployment rates have risen in many advanced economies since the launch of ChatGPT at the end of 2022 and employment among younger workers in AI-related occupations such as software engineers has visibly weakened, it is unclear whether AI was truly the cause of these developments. It argued that the weakening of employment in advanced-economy labor markets is more plausibly explained as the result of companies trying to cut costs in order to offset the impact of the 2021-2022 inflation episode and the subsequent interest rate hikes by central banks.

The slowdown in hiring by U.S. companies began six months before the launch of ChatGPT, and the decline in technology-sector jobs at that time was interpreted as a process of scaling back the surge in hiring that had occurred after the COVID-19 pandemic. The report then explained, "This does not mean that AI is not affecting the labor market, but rather that, compared with the job losses that continually occur due to existing technologies, its impact is relatively limited." It also pointed out that the current weakening of labor markets in advanced economies appears to be much more closely related to cyclical factors such as interest rates and inflation than to AI.

Contrary to expert concerns, the report also noted that U.S. white-collar employment has recently been booming. Since the end of 2022, the number of jobs in related occupations such as management, professional, sales, and office work in the United States has increased by about 3 million. The fact that, over the past three years, the number of software developers has risen by 7% and the number of paralegals by 21% also runs counter to the analysis that these occupations are being replaced by AI.

The report stated, "Although advances in AI technology could completely reshape the labor market, no dramatic changes have occurred so far," citing a study by the Yale Budget Lab which found that the rate of change in the composition of U.S. jobs since the launch of ChatGPT is not significantly different from the periods following the advent of personal computers in the 1980s and the internet in the 1990s. It went on to say that AI is also giving rise to new occupations, such as data annotators (labelers) who enable digital information to be analyzed, on-site engineers who guide AI implementation processes, and chief AI officers. However, the report warned, "Just as many occupations were hit during past eras of computer-technology advancement, some office workers may fail to adapt to AI and be pushed out."