Is AI taking away jobs? It is a concern people hear more and more often, and not without reason.
Artificial intelligence is going to leave everyone unemployed. Or maybe it is already happening. These are the kinds of thoughts people come across often these days, and, honestly, they are not even that easy to dismiss: the automation of certain tasks undoubtedly represents a threat to various professional roles. There is, however, another side of the coin that is too often overlooked, namely the new jobs that are being created.
What if AI isn’t actually taking away jobs?
The topic was at the center of an analysis shared by LinkedIn and published by The Wall Street Journal. It refers to 640,000 hires, or collaborations, in the United States between 2023 and 2025. That is a significant figure, which at least partly offsets the number of cuts and layoffs that artificial intelligence has certainly helped fuel.
So what does the real picture actually look like? It is best to take the figure for what it is: a statistic. And like any statistic, it can be interpreted in different ways, especially when considering the context in which it exists. It refers to a country like the United States, where the labor market follows dynamics that are very different from those in the rest of the world. It is also in the U.S. that the artificial intelligence revolution took off most strongly, so it is only natural that such a boom was recorded there.
Elsewhere, where the technology enters the production process almost exclusively as a product or service to be used, the situation is inevitably different. A company that does not build AI but simply uses it is unlikely to have openings for roles such as Head of AI or AI Engineer.
We shouldn’t jump to conclusions
It should also not be underestimated that people often make the mistake of evaluating the impact of artificial intelligence on the job market by looking only at the cuts and hiring carried out by Big Tech. What happens in Silicon Valley, for example, is not representative of a business and manufacturing landscape like Italy’s, where small and medium-sized enterprises play a fundamental role and, by definition, operate according to very different logic.
In the end, the risk is always the same: sliding into taking sides, with the pros and cons being waved like propaganda tools by one camp or the other. The only real certainty is that change is already underway. Most likely, we will only be able to measure its true impact later on, when AI adoption becomes more structural and less driven by a rush toward innovation that is sometimes not even justified by real needs.
