AI Adoption and Firms’ Job-Posting Behavior

Authors

Jessica Liu, Douglas Webber

August 4, 2026

This note uses job postings data from Lightcast and the Census Bureau’s Business Trends and Outlook Survey to investigate the relationship between AI adoption and firms’ job-posting behavior. We find that thus far, there is no evidence of a reduction in job postings for industries or firms which have higher levels of AI adoption. The overall slowdown in national job postings following the pandemic recovery does not appear to be driven (even modestly) by AI. That said, we focus on the total level of job postings in firms and industries, rather than on specific occupations which may be particularly susceptible to automation via AI. Our results do not imply that there are no pockets of workers who are experiencing a disproportionately difficult job search due to the impact of AI. Rather, our results thus indicate that if there is a large negative impact on some occupations, thus far it has been balanced out by firms switching job postings to other hiring priorities. Moreover, the United States is still in a very early stage of AI development, so the lack of a significant labor market impact at this point is not particularly surprising. The empirical exercise in this note is therefore meant to be part of an active monitoring process for signs of labor market impacts in the months and years to come.

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