6 posts on "AI"
September 1, 2026
Businesses Are Using AI to Transform Work, Not Cut Jobs
The ongoing advancement and adoption of artificial intelligence continues to raise concerns about widespread job losses. Over the past three years, our regional business surveys have asked firms about their AI adoption and its effects on their workforces. This year, we found that AI use among regional businesses has continued to rise sharply, with more than 60 percent of service firms and about half of manufacturers now using AI—a notable increase from 40 percent and 26 percent, respectively, reported in 2025. Despite this rapid adoption, regional firms’ investments in AI are generally modest, usage tends to be concentrated among a small share of workers within firms, and layoffs have remained uncommon. And, while some firms have scaled back hiring due to AI, others have added workers to help them use it. Retraining employees in response to AI remains the primary way firms are adjusting their workforces.
July 7, 2026
Using AI to Let History Speak About Bank Runs
Banking crises are commonly associated with bank runs and banking panics, yet our empirical understanding of bank runs is constrained by a lack of bank-level data. In a new paper, we use large language models (LLMs) to extract information on bank runs from millions of digitized historical newspaper pages, creating the most comprehensive database of bank runs in U.S. history. Every bank run episode that we identify is documented on a companion website where users can browse and examine individual episodes, and read the original newspaper articles. In this post, we describe how we built this dataset and discuss what its basic features reveal.
May 20, 2026
AI’s Macroeconomic Challenges and Promises
In the third quarter of 2025, America’s largest tech firms for the first time spent more on capital investment than they earned from operations. The implication is that AI, a technology with the potential to make the economy more productive, is, for now, absorbing resources faster than it is generating returns. This post discusses how the tension between AI’s long-run promise and its short-run costs affects the outlooks for inflation, real activity, and financial stability.
Posted at 7:00 am in Artificial Intelligence (AI), Inflation, Macroeconomics, Monetary Policy | Permalink
May 14, 2026
Do Job Postings Show Early Labor‑Market Effects of AI?
As generative AI tools become more widely used, a key issue is the technology’s impact on labor demand. Where might we find evidence of that impact? In this post, we examine whether early evidence of AI’s effect on the labor market appears in firms’ job postings. We combine an occupational measure of AI exposure with detailed U.S. job-posting data from Lightcast, which aggregates listings from company career pages, national and local job boards, and job-listing aggregators. Using this data, we test whether postings for AI-exposed occupations declined disproportionately since the release of ChatGPT in late 2022. We find that, while overall hiring has slowed since then, the evidence from job postings provides little indication of a distinct AI-driven decline in labor demand.
September 4, 2025
Are Businesses Scaling Back Hiring Due to AI?
The swift advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) has sparked significant concern that this new technology will replace jobs and stifle hiring. To explore the effects of AI on employment, our August regional business surveys asked firms about their adoption of AI and if they had made any corresponding adjustments to their workforces. Businesses reported a notable increase in AI use over the past year, yet very few firms reported AI-induced layoffs. Indeed, for those already employed, our results indicate AI is more likely to result in retraining than job loss, similar to our findings from last year. That said, AI is influencing recruiting, with some firms scaling back hiring due to AI and some firms adding workers proficient in its use. Looking ahead, however, layoffs and reductions in hiring plans due to AI use are expected to increase, especially for workers with a college degree.
Posted at 10:00 am in Artificial Intelligence (AI), Labor Market, New Jersey, New York, Regional Analysis | Permalink
September 4, 2024
AI and the Labor Market: Will Firms Hire, Fire, or Retrain?
The rapid rise in Artificial Intelligence (AI) has the potential to dramatically change the labor market, and indeed possibly even the nature of work itself. However, how firms are adjusting their workforces to accommodate this emerging technology is not yet clear. Our August regional business surveys asked manufacturing and service firms special topical questions about their use of AI, and how it is changing their workforces. Most firms that report expected AI use in the next six months plan to retrain their workforces, with far fewer reporting adjustments to planned headcounts.
RSS Feed
Follow Liberty Street Economics
