‘It’s not going away’: The Stanford economist who called the AI entry-level jobs crisis early has the receipts

Last August, a team led by Stanford economist Erik Brynjolfsson published a deep look at the impact of AI on jobs, boosted by a “large-scale, high-frequency administrative dataset from ADP,” the largest payroll software provider in the United States. The findings were stark: a significant relative decline in employment for workers ages 22 to 25 in the most AI-exposed occupations since the widespread adoption of generative AI — even after controlling for other economic shocks. Critics pushed back immediately. Google economists said it was interest rates, while others blamed tech-sector overhiring, remote work distortions, pandemic noise. Earlier this month, Apollo Global Management’s Torsten Slok continued to argue that entry-level hiring woes are a feature of the low-hire, low-fire job market, asking “where is the AI jobs crisis?“ Not only did Brynjolfsson keep updating the data, but he partnered with ADP Research, the economics arm of the private payroll data provider, which serves roughly one in six American workers. The effect hasn’t faded after a closer look “Whatever it is,” Brynjolfsson told Fortune, “it’s not going away.” The new numbers come from the Canaries Dashboard, the centerpiece of an expanded partnership between Brynjolfsson’s Stanford Digital Economy Lab and ADP Research, building on that bombshell paper last summer. It draws on information about 4.6 million workers across more than 730 occupations, and the Digital Economy Lab considers this to be its highest-profile dashboard among the several freely accessible, continuously updated AI economic indicators that it maintains to track AI’s effects on the labor market in near-real time. For Brynjolfsson, it is a partial answer to every critic who said his original finding was a blip. “We are flying blind into one of the most consequential periods in world history,” Brynjolfsson said at the platform’s launch.