Paul Mizen

The more hours an executive personally spends using AI, the more jobs they expect it to cut. 💼 Executives using it more than 5 hours a week forecast headcount losses about three times larger than non-users (-2.2% over three years vs -0.7%). Obviously, this is a little bit circular, since the more AI is used, the more it's bound to impinge on human labor, but the magnitude of the difference is pretty huge. A new @nberpubs working paper by Ivan Yotzov and colleagues pooled surveys of nearly 9,000 senior executives across seven countries, run through central bank and university panels, asking about AI use, spending, and expected effects on jobs and sales. Meanwhile, the actual record so far: 87% of firms say AI has had zero effect on their headcount over the past three years. Worth noting that the no-effect figure is the executives' own read, not payroll data, so attributing changes specifically to AI is probably a bit shaky. The correlation doesn't prove the executive's own LLM habit is driving the forecast... but it does mean layoff expectations track personal enthusiasm more closely than anything that's happened in the business so far. If nothing else, all of this reminds us just how fragile any kind of predictions are. There's so much uncertainty around AI in the future that personal experiences might have a much larger influence on outcomes than previously. --- Authors: @iyotzov, @Jose_MariaRD, @I_Am_NickBloom, Philip Bunn, Steven Davis, Kevin Foster, Aaron Jalca, Brent Meyer, @MizenPaul, Michael Navarrete, Pawel Smietanka, @GregoryThwaites, Ben Zhe Wang