Fear of AI-related job losses grows every time another company announces a round of layoffs. As of May 2026, companies reported nearly 90,000 job losses linked to AI, and some reports suggest up to 15% of U.S. jobs will be eliminated by AI over the next five years. Promises from the tech industry that AI will also create new jobs do little to ease fears, especially among the generation that wonders whether anyone will hire when they graduate.
A recent report from Ramp and Revelio Labs, which tracks enterprise AI spending and workforce data from nearly 22,000 companies each, complicates this bleak narrative.
The report found that companies that invest heavily in AI are increasing their headcount more quickly, even in entry-level positions that many fear are doomed to failure. According to the report, “high-intensity adopters” – companies that spend an average of $30 per employee per month on AI in the first three months – saw a 10.2% increase in headcount.
Employee numbers also increased across all functional areas, including engineering, sales, administration, customer service, finance, marketing and academics. The strongest employment growth among high employment intensity users was in the information sector, which includes software, Internet, media and technology companies.
Despite these positive signals, the data is not as rosy as it seems. There is a strong focus on technology-focused, knowledge-based companies – those that may have VC backing and are already growing rapidly. Therefore, it is difficult to say whether AI is contributing to hiring or just appearing at companies that are already expanding.
“This paper does not show that AI creates jobs everywhere,” the paper’s authors admit, “but it refutes claims that AI will lead to widespread job losses.”
It also contradicts claims that AI is destroying all junior jobs. Recent research from Goldman Sachs found that AI has already eliminated about 16,000 net jobs per month over the past year, with Generation Z and young professionals bearing the brunt. However, the report finds that technology-focused companies have actually seen a 12% increase in the number of new entrants.
So what can we take away from this? Perhaps AI is not always a tool for labor substitution, but instead can be a tool for business expansion.
“For software and technology companies, AI can make core output cheaper or faster to produce: writing code, debugging, building internal tools, creating technical documentation, and supporting product development,” the report says. “Lower production costs in these workflows can increase the return on expansion for the entire company, not just the engineering team.”
But companies that buy subscriptions and run pilots but don’t make sustained investments tend not to see headcount gains, according to the report.
This poses the potential for a growing gap between companies that have the resources – such as capital, technical staff, founder networks and management bandwidth – to turn AI adoption into actual business profits and those that are stuck experimenting with subscriptions. In other words, this report suggests that companies that already have the resources will reap the greatest profits.
The paper’s authors speculate that this gap could become even larger, saying: “Companies without these channels could fall behind.”
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https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/29/the-ai-jobs-debate-just-got-messier/
