AI was supposed to be killing jobs. In spring, the labor market is opening up instead

Private employers added 122,000 jobs in May, ADP reported Wednesday, beating the 110,000 economists expected and marking the strongest month of hiring since January of last year. “Hiring was more broad-based in May than we’ve seen in the last few years,” ADP chief economist Nela Richardson said as eight of the 10 sectors gained. That data follows Tuesdays’ JOLTS release in what is becoming a stronger-than-expected “Jobs Week.” Job openings climbed to 7.6 million in April, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Tuesday, up more than 730,000 from an upwardly revised 6.9 million in March and the highest in nearly two years. Taken together, the week’s data so far— the official jobs data comes out Friday—describes a labor market that has stopped sliding, even as inflation worsens. However, this could put new Fed chair Kevin Warsh, who is loath to raise interest rates, in a sticky situation. “If there was downside momentum for much of 2025, it seems to have stabilized, and there’s some prospect for a pickup in job growth this year,” Skanda Amarnath, executive director of Employ America (an org founded in 2019 to combat the policy failures that led to the Global Financial Crisis), told Fortune. The signals, he said, point to a market that has settled at “a growth rate that’s not recessionary.” An easy explanation, with an AI capex boom roaring in the background, is that artificial intelligence is somehow behind the firming, or will soon come to take it all away. Amarnath doesn’t buy it—in either direction. “I don’t think it’s obvious what the AI explanation for some of this is,” he said. The pickup, he said, is mostly two forces that have nothing to do with AI. The first is years of suppressed hiring finally reversing: companies over-hired coming out of the pandemic, spent 2022 through 2025 reversing course and bracing for a recession, and now need to hire again. “The more you