More Jobs, Higher Bar: The 2026 AI Employer Report
AI's introduction to the labor market got off to a rocky start, with speculation that it would be a massive job killer. The data tells a different story. Instead of cutting headcount to save money, companies are using AI to reshape their teams, speed up hiring processes, and raise the bar on what they expect from employees. AI adoption is ramping up, and so far, it looks like a net positive for job creation.
Unclogging the Pipeline: Why Aren’t More Workers Flocking to Lucrative Trade Jobs?
By nearly every measure, trade jobs offer stability, good compensation, and satisfaction in the American economy. And yet, the workforce pipeline feeding them is fragmented, informal, and increasingly strained.
AI-Powered Job Seekers Are Twice as Likely to Land an Offer
The job search has a new dividing line: whether or not you're using AI. ZipRecruiter's Q1 2026 survey of job seekers shows a stark split in how AI-powered job seekers navigate their search compared with their more tech-averse counterparts.
Record-High Women’s Employment Meets the AI Stress Test
The US labor market is reshaping itself around AI, just as women’s employment reaches record levels. But the risks of AI-induced changes to occupations are not evenly distributed amongst workers. Brookings Institution research, confirmed by Anthropic, identifies roughly 6.1 million U.S. workers who face both high AI exposure and low ability to adapt if they are displaced. About 86% of these workers are women, concentrated in clerical and administrative roles.
The Unproven Promise of AI
According to the Federal Reserve’s February Beige Book, businesses are integrating AI to augment output rather than replace jobs. It is tempting to link recent GDP growth, which has diverged from a softening labor market, to productivity gains from AI. Yet despite sensational headlines, AI’s real-world business impact remains limited. And the most important question may not be how AI affects productivity, but who benefits if and when it does.
2026 Labor Market Predictions
2025 has shaped up to be quite a unique year for the labor market. Job growth slowed to a halt, workers became frozen in place, and the labor force shrank. As we look ahead to 2026, the question on everyone’s mind is: when will the thaw begin?
Why 2024 Will Unlock the Second “Roaring Twenties”
The 2020s got off to a rocky start. In 2020, the U.S. suffered job losses of unprecedented magnitude as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. In 2021, thanks to the end of the stay-at-home mandates, and a population flush with stimulus money, the economy recovered so rapidly that it overheated, creating an acute shortage of labor and rapid inflation. In 2022, the Fed responded to 40-year high inflation with a steady diet of interest rate increases, the fastest interest-rate increase cycle on record. In 2023, both the labor market and inflation have cooled, setting us up for what many economists believed was a low-probability scenario, “the soft landing.”