External signal·Federal Reserve Board (FEDS Notes)·Mar 27, 2026·Jessica Liu and Douglas Webber·11 min read
AI Adoption and Firms' Job-Posting Behavior
“Despite the recent boom in AI investment across the economy and fears that the technology will lead to widespread job losses, we find no evidence of negative impacts thus far on firms' job-posting behavior.”
Summary
This Federal Reserve FEDS Note by Jessica Liu and Douglas Webber tests whether firms and industries with higher AI adoption are posting fewer jobs, using Lightcast job-postings data (65,000+ sources) and the Census Bureau's Business Trends and Outlook Survey over September 2023 to November 2025. Across both industry-level (3-digit NAICS) and firm-level adoption measures, and lags of 1 to 12 months, they find no evidence of reduced postings; the only statistically significant coefficients are small and positive. A causal reading of the firm-level results would imply AI adoption raised 2025 postings by just 0.04 to 0.13 percent, which the authors characterize as precisely-estimated null effects. They caveat that they measure total postings, not the specific occupations most susceptible to automation, so localized displacement (e.g. entry-level) could be offset by firms reallocating hiring to other priorities. The exercise is explicitly backward-looking and framed as part of an ongoing monitoring process.
Predictions for the future of work
The authors deliberately avoid forecasting — they stress the US is at a very early stage of AI development and that their backward-looking results say nothing about the trajectory ahead, a restraint that is itself the finding. The implicit future-of-work read is that, through late 2025, the narrative of AI-driven labor-market deterioration is simply not visible in aggregate job-posting volumes, and any occupational displacement has so far been balanced out by firms switching postings to other hiring priorities. They cite related work (Brynjolfsson, Chandar, and Chen 2025) finding entry-level employment declines in occupations where AI automates work alongside stable or growing employment for more experienced workers, and commit to watching occupation-level divergence in the months and years to come.
Originally published by Federal Reserve Board (FEDS Notes) · Mar 27, 2026
Read the original at Federal Reserve Board (FEDS Notes)