Labour market data: a million AI jobs, 640,000 created, and trades demand

Let's continue on the theme — let's continue on the theme of the economy. Uh, so one of the concerns driving a lot of fear, at least in the US, probably around the world, is the concept that AI is destroying jobs. So 6 months ago we've said that the data looked murky, and over the last — through the last few months, you know, the data has come out very pro job creation, and I want to get this story out to people, you know, so that you can remain optimistic and we can quell the fear. It's one of the missions of our podcast here at Moonshots.

So this week once again, emerging labor market data suggests that technology is a net job creator in the US. Roughly 1 million professional positions are now classified as AI jobs, while LinkedIn estimated that 640,000 AI-specific jobs were created between 2023 and 2025. The boom is also generating employment far beyond just software AI jobs. Roughly $500 billion in additional annual spending on chips, servers, data centers, cooling and power infrastructure is supporting the demand for electricians, HVAC specialists and technicians. While even those occupations previously expected to face AI disruption, including paralegals and market research analysts, have continued to grow despite the fears. Like Eric Schmidt recently said, AI-exposed jobs are growing faster and paying better.

Bottom line, if you're watching and are concerned about your job or concerned about getting a job, your number one focus should be getting AI literate, learning the tools, making yourself prepared for an AI-dominated future.

You know, Salim, a couple episodes [ago] you shared on the pod the data around the majority of adding jobs as a result of AI. Your thoughts on this?

Yeah, I mean, two episodes ago — six — we [had] the data from Principal Financial Group. Uh, they have 100-plus thousand small businesses as clients. 60-plus percent were adding jobs because of AI and 1% — 1.4% — were losing jobs because of AI. So that's just an overwhelming thing.

David Sacks talks about this all on the All-In podcast all the time, that the job is a huge misnomer, right? And you have to kind of get rid of that and ignore that for a while, because this transition is going to be uh huge. We — our negative goes straight to, oh my God, we're going to lose the work. But the really — thing — bigger picture is what happens to the future of work and how does that transform to be better, right?

When we've done — there's a bunch of studies that show something like 74% of work in big companies is coordination work, and now you can get rid of all of that. Erik Brynjolfsson calls this white collar drudgery. You can get rid of that. Work on — let AI handle a lot of the crap stuff, that copying and pasting sales figures from one report, one system into another. And then work on where your judgment and experience make the biggest uh difference in the work and for the company and for the organization uh you're going to work. People worry about trying to work around policy around this — figure out how you maximize human agency as we go through this crazy transition. And human agency is exploding because of AI.