Concerns about AI-related job losses grow every time another company announces layoffs. Companies have announced nearly 90,000 AI-related layoffs by May 2026, and some estimates predict that up to 15% of U.S. jobs will be eliminated over the next five years. The tech industry’s promise that AI will also create new jobs does little to ease fears, especially for a generation wondering whether anyone will hire them when they graduate.
A recent report from Ramp and Revelio Labs, each tracking enterprise AI spending and employee records from about 22,000 companies, complicates that bleak story.
The report found that companies spending heavily on AI are rapidly increasing their headcount, even in entry-level roles that many fear are doomed. According to the report, “high adopters” – those who spent an average of $30 per month per employee on AI in the first three months – saw a 10.2% increase in headcount.
We also increased headcount across departments, including engineering, sales, administration, customer service, finance, marketing and scientist roles. Among active adopters, the largest job growth was in the information sector, which includes software, Internet, media, and technology companies.
Despite these positive signs, the data is not as rosy as it seems. This trend is heavily skewed toward tech-forward knowledge work companies, venture capital-backed companies that are just growing fast, making it difficult to tell whether AI is contributing to jobs or just showing up in companies that are just expanding.
“This paper does not show that AI will universally create jobs,” the authors acknowledge, “but it refutes the claim that AI will lead to widespread job losses.”
It also refutes claims that AI is taking away all jobs from young workers. According to a recent study by Goldman Sachs, AI has already eliminated about 16,000 net jobs per month over the past year, with Gen Z and entry-level workers bearing the brunt of the burden. However, the report found that technology-forward companies actually saw a 12% increase in the number of entry-level employees.
So what can we take away from this? Perhaps AI is not necessarily a tool to replace the workforce, but instead can be a tool to scale businesses.
“For software and technology companies, AI enables them to produce core deliverables cheaper or faster, such as writing code, debugging, building internal tools, writing technical documentation, and supporting product development,” the report says. “If these workflows reduce production costs, there can be a higher return on growth not just for the engineering team but for the company as a whole.”
However, the report found that companies that buy subscriptions and pilots, but don’t continue to make ongoing investments, are less likely to increase their headcount.
This could widen the gap between companies with the capital, technical staff, founder networks, management bandwidth, and other resources to turn AI deployments into real business benefits, and those stuck in subscription experiments. In other words, the report suggests that companies that already have the resources will benefit the most.
The study’s authors speculate that this chasm may continue to widen, noting that “companies without these channels may fall behind.”
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