Skip to content
You can now search across every topic, entity and event.What's new
AI: Jobs, Power & Money
21SEP

NBER: nine in ten firms untouched by AI

2 min read
16:45UTC

A multinational survey of 6,000 executives found most companies see no employment effect from AI. Inside those same firms, bosses and workers hold opposite forecasts.

← Back to AI closes the hiring door, not the exitJump to analysis ↓
EconomicDeveloping
Key takeaway

Bosses expect AI to cut jobs while their own employees expect it to create them.

A survey of nearly 6,000 senior executives across the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, and Australia, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, found that 90% of firms report no impact on employment or productivity from AI so far. 1 Sixty-nine per cent of the surveyed firms actively use the technology. Nine in ten see nothing happening.

The contradiction sits inside the forecasts. Executives at these firms predict a 0.7% employment decline over the next three years. Employees at the same companies predict a 0.5% increase. 2 One group expects cuts. The other expects growth. They work in the same buildings, use the same tools, and hold irreconcilable views of what comes next.

During the 1990s offshoring wave, management planned relocations years before workers learned their roles would move overseas. Approximately 3.4 million US manufacturing jobs were lost between 1995 and 2005. Workers could not prepare because they did not know. The NBER data, spanning four countries with different labour market systems, suggests this gap is structural, not cultural . If executives act on private bearish forecasts without informing staff, displacement will arrive as a shock rather than a managed transition.

Deep Analysis

In plain English

A research body surveyed nearly 6,000 bosses across the US, UK, Germany, and Australia and asked whether AI has yet affected hiring or productivity at their companies. Nine in ten said no. But the same bosses predict employment at their firms will fall slightly over the next three years. Workers at those same companies predict it will rise slightly. Someone is wrong. Given that bosses set hiring plans, their forecast is more likely to be self-fulfilling.

Deep Analysis
Root Causes

Information asymmetry within firms is the structural cause. Executives have access to strategic planning documents, vendor capability assessments, and board-level restructuring discussions that do not reach workers. The 1.2-percentage-point forecast gap (0.7% decline vs 0.5% increase) is more consistent with deliberate non-disclosure than with genuine disagreement.

The 69% active AI adoption rate combined with the 90% null employment impact suggests a deployment phase that is currently affecting task structure without reducing headcount. The NBER finding by Humlum and Vestergaard that LLM adoption produces occupational switching without net changes in hours or earnings supports this reading: impact is happening below the level of employment statistics.

Measurement lag is also structural. Employment surveys capture headcount but not task composition or hiring freeze effects. The Dallas Fed found displacement operating primarily through collapsed job-finding rates among workers under 25, a mechanism invisible to standard employment impact questions.

What could happen next?
  • Risk

    The executive-employee forecast gap may widen as deployment accelerates, producing a shock dynamic similar to 1990s offshoring where workers had no preparation time.

    Medium term · Medium
  • Consequence

    Policymakers relying on current employment statistics will underestimate displacement risk because the primary mechanism is hiring suppression, not firing, which appears later in official data.

    Short term · High
  • Meaning

    The 90% null result at 69% adoption rates confirms the technology is in a pre-deployment productivity phase; the employment shock, if it arrives, will be sudden rather than gradual.

    Long term · Medium
Sources:NBER (Yotzov, Barrero, Bloom, Bunn, Davis et al)
Mentions:United Kingdom →Prima →United States →Anthropic →Dario Amodei →National Bureau of Economic Research →
First Reported In

Update #3 · The AI jobs data contradicts itself

NBER (Yotzov, Barrero, Bloom, Bunn, Davis et al)· 28 Mar 2026
Read original →
Causes and effects
This Event
NBER: nine in ten firms untouched by AI
The largest cross-country executive survey reveals a dangerous information gap: employers expect job losses while their own workers expect gains.
Led to
Columbia: 75% of jobless never file claims
NBER finding that 90% of firms report zero AI impact persists because measurement systems cannot see the displaced workers.
Occurred 28 Mar 2026
Read story →
Different Perspectives
Salesforce, Synopsys and TD Bank Group
Salesforce, Synopsys and TD Bank Group
Salesforce, Synopsys and TD Bank Group each filed quarterly disclosures in late August booking restructuring charges, or none at all, without naming AI as a cause. Their silence matters because Challenger's tracker shows AI as a stated reason fell to fourth place in August even as the year-to-date AI-cut total still leads at 116,175.
Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan and Indonesia
Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan and Indonesia
Singapore launched its Skills and Workforce Development Agency on 16 September, giving citizens six months of free premium AI tools, while South Korea ring-fenced its AI tax windfall in a new Future Response Fund. Taiwan kept funding its AI build past NT$190bn and Indonesia rewired vocational training around AI literacy, betting state-built skills beat a market-led adjustment.
ver.di, CGT Fonction Publique and CCOO
ver.di, CGT Fonction Publique and CCOO
Germany's ver.di banked a 3.3% pay rise on 1 September and opened talks on a Tarifvertrag Transformation covering dismissal bans and reskilling, while France's CGT rejected Paris's AI negotiating timetable the same week. Spain's CCOO went further on 21 September, proposing to tax companies by the jobs they generate rather than wait for the next bargaining round.
BIS General Manager and Federal Reserve governors
BIS General Manager and Federal Reserve governors
The BIS's General Manager said on 10 September that AI displacement remains limited, even as the BIS's own survey found nearly 80% of firms plan to automate roles. Two Federal Reserve governors made the same point in July, arguing the labour-market data does not yet show a mass-firing event.
Bank of Canada, ONS and ECB
Bank of Canada, ONS and ECB
The Bank of Canada found the job-finding gap between AI-exposed and unexposed occupations widened from 2.2 to 13.9 percentage points since 2015-19, while separations barely moved. That framing, a hiring freeze rather than a firing wave, is echoed by the ECB's finding that euro-area AI use hit 52% of workers in 2026, concentrated among the university-educated.
Office for National Statistics
Office for National Statistics
Deferred its Transformed Labour Force Survey beyond November 2027 and disclosed a May 2026 telephone-collection failure. The ONS carries no AI-attribution layer at all, so Britain sits outside this month's cohort of measuring states by its own admission.