AI’s on the job: What’s a worker to do?

With fears of an AI-driven jobs apocalypse rising, workers — especially younger ones — could use some advice right about now.

Leading AI experts speaking at the 2026 SIEPR Economic Summit delivered.  In a panel discussion on the economic impacts of artificial intelligence, they gave insights into today’s job market and guidance on how to think about the potential workplace disruption to come.

First, there were reassuring words from Erika McEntarfer, until recently the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics and now the Tad and Dianne Taube Policy Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR). The bottom isn’t falling out of the job market, she said, but there are signs of weakness.

“Unemployment is edging up for those most AI-exposed occupations,” McEntarfer said, “but much more slowly than it is rising for everyone else.” The slowdown in hiring over the last 18 months has mostly impacted manual labor jobs, she said.

The bigger fear is what may come next. Erik Brynjolfsson is a SIEPR senior fellow and director of Stanford’s Digital Economy Lab whose co-authored research has identified a steady slide in hiring of workers whose jobs are most vulnerable to AI’s advancing capabilities — software engineering and call-center customer support, for example. Speaking at the Summit, before a standing-room audience of leaders in business, government and academia, Brynjolfsson said that if unemployment rates for these workers continue to slide and if the falloff in hiring spreads to more jobs, “we’re going to see much more striking effects” of AI on the labor market overall.

“I’m pretty confident that [AI will drive] productivity gains and about the wealth that is going to be created” as a result, Brynjolfsson said. “I’m really concerned that it’s not going to be evenly distributed, and that a lot of people will be hurt in a significant way.”   

What’s urgently needed now, but lacking, are government policies aimed at creating a more flexible economy — one where there’s better real-time data and sufficient training programs to help workers gain new skills. “I feel like we’re kind of flying blind [and] not putting in place the infrastructure we need,” Brynjolfsson said.

Charles “Chad” Jones, a SIEPR senior fellow and the STANCO 25 Professor of Economics at Stanford Graduate School of Business, echoed these concerns. “I think a world where growth explodes is very likely a world of great inequality,” he said. A future in which AI, instead of posing an existential threat to humans, drives economic growth “is a world of incredible abundance, and that incredible abundance should let us solve problems” like extreme inequality.

So what can young workers be doing today to prepare for tomorrow’s unknowns, asked moderator Neale Mahoney, the Trione Director at SIEPR and the TG Wijaya Professor of Economics at the Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences.

Speakers offered some ideas:

• Use AI to learn, not just automate. Brynjolfsson said research shows that employment is falling among workers who use AI to automate tasks, but growing for those adopting AI to learn new skills.
• Identify where humans have the advantage. AI executes, but humans define problems and evaluate solutions. Identify the “weak links” — or bottlenecks — in a series of tasks needed to get a job done that can’t be automated, and focus on those as your added value, Jones said.
• Don’t forget to show up. “Never underestimate just how valuable [being a worker who can] get stuff done for your boss is, regardless of your skillset,” McEntarfer said.

Photos by Ryan Zhang.