- LinkedIn executive says AI adoption won’t affect hiring too much
- As bad as it gets
- Separate research claims that Gen Z are increasingly seeking “poly-employment” with multiple part-time roles rather than a single full-time position
A senior LinkedIn executive has pushed back against widely reported claims that AI adoption is leading to a decline in hiring — despite the company’s evidence that appears to contradict this.
Speaking at the Semafor World Economy Summit (via TechCrunch), Blake Lawit, LinkedIn’s head of global affairs and legal officer, said the company’s data shows a 20% drop in hiring since 2022, but denied AI was to blame.
“On LinkedIn…we have an economic graph that’s over a billion members. We have companies, jobs, skills,” Lawit noted, “it’s really a great real-time picture of what’s happening in the labor market. And we’ve looked—because everybody wants to know the answer to this question: Is artificial intelligence affecting jobs right now? We’ve looked, and frankly, we’ve seen it.”
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Hiring is down – for the time being
Rather than AI being the culprit, Lawit suggested that a recent rise in interest rates was to blame for the drop in hiring rates.
“We haven’t seen the kind of impacts that you would expect to see in areas where everyone is talking about artificial intelligence,” he noted, as well as industries, whether it’s customer support, administrative or marketing — all of these places, if we saw impacts [from] AI that’s where it would be…Yes, hiring is down, but not down any more.”
Younger adults are expected to be hit much harder by the impact of AI in the workplace, with the technology set to take over many of the low-level tasks associated with entry-level jobs.
But Lawit again argued that LinkedIn’s data did not show any kind of decline, but urged caution, noting, “(it) doesn’t mean it’s not going to happen in the future, but not yet.”
Lawit’s claims clash somewhat with recent research that claims younger Gen Z workers are actually eschewing full-time jobs for a combination of part-time roles.
A new study from Deputy claims that “poly-employment” – working multiple jobs simultaneously – has hit a new high, with Gen Z leading the way, comprising more than half (55%) of those involved in the practice.
“AI is not replacing the shift economy; it is fueling it,” said Silvija Martincevic, CEO of Deputy. “It’s already helping frontline teams work faster and more efficiently. But many workers still have no idea how the technology is being implemented around them. That gap between what AI is doing and what workers understand is the defining challenge in this next phase of workforce transformation. The companies that take it seriously and bring their employees on board instead of leaving them in the dark are the ones who will.”
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