The AI/Labor Report — Wednesday, 10 June 2026

The AI/Labor Report — Wednesday, 10 June 2026

GitLab [https://www.bbntimes.com/technology/gitlab-cuts-14-of-workforce-to-fuel-ai-agentic-era-ambitions] reported revenue of $264 million last quarter, up 23% year over year. It beat analyst expectations. Then it laid off 350 people. The company calls its restructuring GitLab Act 2 [https://about.gitlab.com/blog/gitlab-act-2/], a repositioning for what it describes as the “agentic era” of software development, in which autonomous AI agents handle coding, reviewing, deploying, and maintaining software under human oversight. The savings from cutting 350 jobs go directly into GitLab’s AI agent platform, Duo, which generated roughly $20 million in committed recurring revenue after its first full quarter. Management expects no material revenue from Duo in fiscal 2026. A profitable company is trading its current human workforce for a product that will not pay off this year. Listen on Apple Podcasts [https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-ai-labor-report/id1896663061] That pattern repeats across the industry with reliable consistency. The organization does not need to be struggling. Revenue growth is beside the point. What drives the restructuring is the calculation that AI agents will multiply productivity per remaining employee while reducing the total headcount required. GitLab is simply one of the most candid companies about naming that logic publicly. The wage data coming out of Europe and the United Kingdom shows the downstream consequence for individual workers. An Oxford University study of more than 10 million UK job postings [https://www.weforum.org/stories/2026/02/ai-improving-wages-job-quality/] found that candidates with AI-related skills command a 23% wage premium on average. A Master’s degree carries a 13% premium. A Bachelor’s degree carries 8%. AI proficiency now outperforms formal educational credentials in immediate labor market returns. The same research found that AI skills helped older workers and candidates without advanced degrees improve their hiring prospects substantially when those skills appeared on a resume, particularly when supported by a recognized certificate. The catch is in what happens to the workers on the other side of that divide. An IMF staff discussion note published this year [https://www.imf.org/en/publications/staff-discussion-notes/issues/2026/01/09/bridging-skill-gaps-for-the-future-new-jobs-creation-in-the-ai-age-572136] finds that about one in ten job vacancies in advanced economies now demands at least one new AI-related skill. Those vacancies post higher wages. They also correlate with lower employment in occupations with high AI exposure and low complementarity with AI tools, posing direct challenges for younger workers entering those fields. The labor market is not simply rewarding AI fluency. It is simultaneously defunding the entry points that workers once used to build the experience that eventually earns those higher wages. A LinkedIn report presented at Chatham House on June 9 [https://www.chathamhouse.org/events/all/standard-event/ai-work-and-future-global-competitiveness] puts a headline number on the productive upside: AI could unlock up to $6.6 trillion in capacity for businesses in the U.S., UK, France, Germany, and India if implemented across all work tasks. The LinkedIn framing is the one corporate communications departments will circulate internally. The IMF framing is the one workers in AI-exposed roles should read alongside it. Both documents describe the same economy. They assign the gains and the costs to different people. Today, GitLab holds its Transcend conference [https://www.thestreet.com/employment/github-rival-shuts-offices-cuts-100s-of-workers-gitlab], where the company is expected to release the next wave of its agentic AI product roadmap. The announcements will name specific developer tasks that AI agents are slated to absorb next. That list will be worth tracking closely, because each item on it represents work that currently requires a human being. The political response to all of this arrived from an unexpected direction this week. Senator Bernie Sanders announced the American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act [https://fortune.com/2026/06/03/bernie-sanders-ai-ownership-sovereign-wealth-fund-electrification/], which would impose a one-time 50% tax on AI company stock paid in shares, depositing that equity into a public fund giving ordinary Americans voting rights, board representation, and eventually a direct payment. The proposal is built on a straightforward argument: AI is built on publicly funded research, trained on publicly generated data, and deployed in ways that displace workers who have no recourse under current law. The public, Sanders argues, should own a share of what it helped create. The AI/Labor Report is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman met privately with Sanders [https://www.bostonglobe.com/2026/06/06/nation/trump-sanders-and-altman-all-talking-about-public-ownership-in-ai/] and said he also wants the public to have equity in AI companies, though he declined to support the 50% threshold. President Trump told reporters Friday [https://fortune.com/2026/06/05/trump-partnership-openai-anthropic-xai-nationalization-bernie-sanders-altman/] that the U.S. government may take direct equity stakes in OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI, calling it “a beautiful thing.” The left and the right and the CEO of the most powerful AI company in the world are now circling the same populist anxiety. None of them have agreed on anything. Workers displaced by the tools those companies sell are still waiting for a law that requires anyone to tell them why. BUY NOW! [https://wimdodson.gumroad.com/l/gods_in_the_machine?_gl=1*19da5a0*_ga*MTEwMjE2MDkwMy4xNzc2OTY4MDQy*_ga_6LJN6D94N6*czE3NzY5NjgwNDEkbzEkZzEkdDE3NzY5NjgxNzIkajU5JGwwJGgw] Get the NEW Book that exposes the Narratives Tech uses to build its AI Empire. $4.95 flat fee for Kindle, Nook, Tablets, and Mobile. No subscription required.3.5-hr reading time. Get full access to The AI/Labor Report at ailabor.substack.com/subscribe [https://ailabor.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

Uber fires HR Division; Uber's AI budget gone in four months; Manila's 2M jobs at risk; OpenAI Codex plugins target job titles; California slow-walks for AI/jobs protections

Uber had a busy week. On June 3, the company cut 23% of its People and Places division [https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/03/uber-layoffs-people-division-ai.html]. The division covers human resources, recruiting, workplace facilities, and corporate culture. The official explanation was organizational complexity and overlapping responsibilities. The company was careful to say artificial intelligence played no role in the decision. Days earlier, Uber’s chief technology officer disclosed the company had burned through its entire 2026 AI coding budget in four months [https://www.techtimes.com/articles/317842/20260605/uber-cuts-23-hr-staff-new-president-denies-ai-role-95-engineers-use-it-daily.htm]. Ninety-five percent of Uber’s engineers use AI tools every month. Close to 70% of committed code is now generated by AI systems. Uber still lists more than 800 open positions. The company is reorganizing, not shrinking. The division being restructured happens to be the one that manages human workers. Now, AI tools handle a large share of the work human workers used to support. Earlier in the year, Deutsche Bank analysts coined a term for this pattern: AI redundancy washing [https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/uber-ai-budget-job-cuts-1801340]. It describes companies that use AI as the stated reason for cuts when the real drivers are more complicated. The Uber case is the cleanest example yet of both dynamics running at the same time. On June 2, OpenAI announced that Codex, its AI coding agent, now has more than 5 million weekly users [https://openai.com/index/codex-for-knowledge-work/]. Developers are still the largest group, but knowledge workers now represent 20% of users and are growing three times faster than developers. To accelerate that shift, OpenAI released six role-specific plugins targeting data analytics, creative production, sales, product design, equity investing, and investment banking [https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/02/openai-launches-new-codex-tools-for-white-collar-work/]. Each plugin integrates directly with coporate tools like Salesforce, Jira, and Notion. The move mirrors a similar enterprise push from Anthropic earlier this year. So, OpenAI has designed tools that approximate specific jobs. The list of roles in those six plugins covers a substantial portion of what mid-level office workers at large companies spend their days doing. One in five Codex users today is already a non-developer. That share is growing faster than any other segment. Governments in general are watching the AI drama unfold and are still moving slowly. California is moving faster than most. On May 21, Governor Gavin Newsom signed Executive Order N-6-26 [https://www.gov.ca.gov/2026/05/21/governor-newsom-signs-first-of-its-kind-executive-order-to-prepare-workers-and-businesses-for-potential-ai-disruption/], directing state agencies to evaluate whether the state can update California’s WARN Act to catch AI-driven workforce reductions before they happen rather than after. WARN is the law that requires advance notice for mass layoffs Recommendations to the governor’s office are due in 180 days. A separate California bill, SB 951 [https://www.reedsmith.com/our-insights/blogs/employment-law-watch/102mx9t/whats-new-in-californias-response-to-ai-workforce-disruption/], would require 90 days advance notice before any AI-driven layoff affecting 25 or more workers. The federal government has no equivalent law. No employer anywhere in the United States currently faces a legal obligation to disclose whether AI drove a workforce reduction. In Europe, the regulatory picture shifted in the opposite direction. In May, the European Parliament and Council reached a provisional agreement to delay the EU AI Act’s employment enforcement deadline [https://www.fisherphillips.com/en/insights/insights/eu-overhauls-ai-act-just-before-key-deadline] by 16 months, moving it from August 2, 2026 to December 2, 2027. The rules being delayed cover AI systems used in hiring, performance evaluation, worker monitoring, promotion, and termination decisions. Employers using those systems in Europe now have more time to comply. Workers in those same workplaces have 16 more months without the protections those rules would have provided. The international dimension of this story reaches further than European regulatory calendars. A Harvard Business Review analysis published June 5 [https://www.365outsource.com/virtual-assistance/ai-powered-assistants-philippine-outsourcing/] argues that generative AI is dismantling the labor-cost arbitrage that built the global outsourcing industry. The AI/Labor Report is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. The Philippines employs 2 million people in business process outsourcing and generates $40 billion annually from it. India’s sector employs 6 million and contributes 7% of GDP. Industry analysts project 2 to 3 million workers across both countries face disruption by 2030 [https://news.outsourceaccelerator.com/ai-threats-bpo-india-philippines/]. That means roughly 1 million BPO and IT jobs at direct risk in India. Oracle already cut 12,000 jobs in India in April as it redirected spending toward AI infrastructure. The layoff mechanism operating in Manila and Bengaluru is the same one operating in Uber’s People and Places division. The work that once required a human in a lower-cost location now requires a software subscription. The geography of the cost savings has changed, but the math facing workers has not. Get full access to The AI/Labor Report at ailabor.substack.com/subscribe [https://ailabor.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

Grads earn $56K not $80K; 42.5% of grads underemployed; remote work pulled up job ladder, AI chipping away at higher rungs; AI agents fail 19 of 20 tasks; FOMO begetting FOBO

Graduation season arrived this year with an unusual tradition. Commencement speakers who mention artificial intelligence keep getting booed. The students are not being dramatic. The unemployment rate for recent college graduates hit 5.6% in the first quarter of 2026 [https://www.cnbc.com/select/class-of-2026-hiring-stats-and-ai-trends/], the highest level in a decade outside the pandemic spike. The national unemployment rate is 4.3%. Recent graduates are now doing worse in the job market than the average American worker, which has not been the normal pattern for people with four-year degrees. The underemployment rate for new graduates reached 42.5%, the highest since 2020. Listen on Apple Podcasts [https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-ai-labor-report/id1896663061] Graduates expect to earn $80,004 in their first year out of college. Actual starting salaries average $56,153 [https://www.cnbc.com/select/class-of-2026-hiring-stats-and-ai-trends/]. Applications per job posting jumped 26% while early-career postings fell 16%. The Class of 2026 is walking into a labor market that is hiring less, paying less, and competing more than the one their older siblings entered. Remote Work Created the Problem. AI Is About to Make It Worse. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York published a study on June 1 [https://fortune.com/2026/06/01/new-fed-study-remote-work-ai-driving-higher-unemployment/] attributing 64% of the rise in young graduate unemployment to remote work rather than AI. Companies are reluctant to hire inexperienced workers into roles where mentoring and on-the-job training are difficult to deliver remotely. Unemployment among graduates under 29 rose 20% after the pandemic. Unemployment among graduates over 29 in the same fields fell slightly over the same period. The Fed’s claim is that new workers need proximity to learn, and remote work removed that proximity. The New York Fed researchers noted their own finding may be temporary. Stanford researchers found that early-career workers aged 22 to 25 in the most AI-exposed jobs saw employment fall 16% since late 2022 even after stripping out remote-friendly roles. Nevertheless, the aphorism that arose during the peak-Covid remote work experience applies here to new job entrants: If you can do you can do your work remotely, so can a machine. Jobs Are Not Disappearing. They Are Shrinking. A May 2026 Gartner report covered by The Register [https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/05/06/ai-layoffs-backfire-as-cutting-staff-doesnt-cut-it-firms-warned/5230631] describes AI’s effect on employment as hollowing out rather than elimination. AI absorbs discrete tasks within existing roles, narrows the scope of work, and compresses wages without necessarily removing the job title from the org chart. Workers whose roles depend on judgment, context, and accountability may find AI a useful tool. Workers whose roles depend on processing, routing, summarizing, and formatting are finding themselves doing less of that work, earning wages that reflect the reduced scope, and uncertain about how the change happened. Imperial College London and Microsoft jointly found [https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/05/06/ai-layoffs-backfire-as-cutting-staff-doesnt-cut-it-firms-warned/5230631] that AI adoption paradoxically increases workplace burdens for workers who remain, as their jobs shift toward reviewing, verifying, and correcting the output of multiple AI agents. Gartner forecasts that new job categories will emerge from this transition by 2028 or 2029. That is a gap of two to three years during which the hollowing out continues without the offset. When Every Company Automates at Once, Everyone Loses A paper published June 3 by University of Pennsylvania researchers [https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.20617] took at at AI FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) by herds of corporate execs as potentially harmful to their own companies interests. Each individual company rationally reduces labor costs through AI adoption without waiting to see if the AI will actually do the jobs. When all companies do it simultaneously, consumer spending contracts, revenue bases erode, and the productivity gains from automation are collectively undermined. Each company individually believes it is making the rational balance-sheet decision to lay off staff. Bureau of Economic Analysis data cited in the paper [https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.20617] shows business investment overtook consumer spending as the primary driver of U.S. GDP growth in Q1 2026. The personal savings rate fell to 3.6% in March, its lowest since late 2022. Workers are spending down savings while companies invest upward. The productivity gains are flowing into capital formation. They are not reaching household income. The Agents Companies Are Replacing Workers With Cannot Do the Work A CBC News investigation published June 3 [https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/ai-agents-tech-company-layoffs-9.7221069] pulled together the controlled performance evidence on AI agents. Carnegie Mellon’s TheAgentCompany benchmark tested 10 leading AI agent models across 175 real-world office tasks. The best-performing model completed 30.3% of tasks successfully. Gartner found AI agents produce incorrect results on office tasks roughly 70% of the time. A major AI infrastructure company stated its agents fail to produce professionally acceptable work more than 19 times out of 20. Companies are replacing workers with these tools right now. Block’s stock jumped 20% when it announced AI-attributed layoffs. Future Forwarded is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. A University of Toronto researcher told CBC that the explanation is straightforward: “Investment in AI as an ideology has more value than keeping your workforce. That’s how capitalism works.” Workers who remain after AI-related cuts find their jobs have changed. Their new role is reviewing, correcting, and monitoring the agents that replaced their former colleagues. BUY NOW! [https://wimdodson.gumroad.com/l/gods_in_the_machine?_gl=1*19da5a0*_ga*MTEwMjE2MDkwMy4xNzc2OTY4MDQy*_ga_6LJN6D94N6*czE3NzY5NjgwNDEkbzEkZzEkdDE3NzY5NjgxNzIkajU5JGwwJGgw] Get the NEW Book that exposes the Narratives Tech uses to build its AI Empire. $4.95 flat fee for Kindle, Nook, Tablets, and Mobile. No subscription required.3.5-hr reading time. Get full access to The AI/Labor Report at ailabor.substack.com/subscribe [https://ailabor.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

Record AI job cuts, record jobs report — same Friday; tech shed 38K jobs; 172K added elsewhe; white-collar cuts hidden; 40M gig workers unprotected; S Korea has a plan, the U.S. does not

The headline number from this morning’s government jobs report deserves a closer look before anyone feels too good about it. The economy added 172,000 jobs in May. Wall Street expected 80,000. The unemployment rate held at 4.3%. On paper, this is a strong labor market doing exactly what a strong labor market is supposed to do. On the same day that report landed, Challenger, Gray & Christmas published its May layoff data [https://www.hcamag.com/us/specialization/recruitment/ai-driven-tech-job-cuts-hit-two-year-high-leaving-hr-leaders-to-adapt/577778]. Employers across all industries announced 97,006 job cuts in May. AI was the stated reason for 38,579 of those cuts, the highest single-month AI-attributed total since Challenger began tracking the category. Listen on Apple Podcasts [https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-ai-labor-report/id1896663061] That figure represents 40% of all announced cuts in May. In January, AI accounted for 7%. The acceleration over five months is not subtle. Andy Challenger, the firm’s chief revenue officer, stated the situation plainly: “AI is now the leading reason companies give for cutting jobs.” The Sectors Doing the Hiring Are Not the Sectors Doing the Cutting The BLS breakdown [https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm] shows May’s job gains concentrated in leisure and hospitality, local government, and health care. Finance shed jobs. The information sector, which covers technology and media, continued its contraction. The jobs being added and the jobs being eliminated belong to different industries and different workers. A hotel housekeeper in Orlando and a software engineer in Seattle both show up in the same nonfarm payroll count. Only one of them is having a good month. Filings for unemployment insurance have not risen meaningfully [https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2026/jun/04/us-tech-sector-announces-most-job-cuts-in-nearly-t/] despite the surge in layoff announcements. Bloomberg noted targeted white-collar positions specifically. White-collar workers who lose jobs tend to have savings that delay their need to file. Some are classified as contractors and cannot file at all. The aggregate unemployment data looks stable in part because the people being cut are the ones least visible in the headline figures. Technology’s Running Total U.S. tech companies have announced 123,653 job cuts [https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/tech-sector-cut-us-jobs-by-38242-in-may] through the first five months of 2026, up 65% from the same period in 2025. May alone produced 38,242 tech-sector cuts, the industry’s worst month since August 2024. The companies leading that list are the same companies committing to the largest AI capital spending in corporate history. Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta plan a combined $725 billion in AI infrastructure spending in 2026. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told staff directly that the company’s 8,000 job cuts were a consequence of that spending commitment. The trade-off between AI investment and headcount is no longer implied. It is stated. Southeast Asia Builds the Infrastructure While Workers Go Unprotected The same infrastructure build plays out differently in Southeast Asia, where its human costs are distributed across a workforce with no safety net at all. A May report documented roughly 40 million gig economy workers across the region [https://apnews.com/article/artificial-intelligence-economy-jobs-southeast-asia-automation] facing AI-driven displacement with no pensions, no health insurance, and no protection against dismissal. Singapore just signed $234 million in contracts with Google and OpenAI. Malaysia’s semiconductor exports reached $117 billion. Standard Chartered plans to use AI to eliminate 7,000 jobs across India, Malaysia, and Poland by 2030. The data center construction that partly offsets AI displacement in U.S. labor statistics creates no equivalent offset in Kuala Lumpur. Korea Built a Policy Architecture. The U.S. Has Not. South Korea’s 2026 National AI Action Plan [https://carnegieendowment.org/research/2026/04/ai-labor-market-policy-east-asia] coordinates responses across multiple government ministries, according to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The Ministry of Employment and Labor in South Korea developed guidelines for analyzing AI’s industry-by-industry impact. The Ministry of Science and ICT is building regional AI competency hubs. The plan includes an Inclusive Labor Transition National Strategy with compensation provisions for AI-driven job loss. Concurrently, China’s Ministry of Human Resources announced a parallel lifelong vocational skills system [https://carnegieendowment.org/research/2026/04/ai-labor-market-policy-east-asia] designed for different career stages. Both governments treat AI as a managed industrial transformation. The United States has no federal equivalent to either program. The AI/Labor Report is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Japan’s Lag Creates Its Own Risk An OECD report on Japan’s labor market [https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/2025/11/ai-and-the-labour-market_bc53f7bb.html] found that only 40% of Japanese managers work at companies using any algorithmic management software. It’s the lowest rate among all OECD economies surveyed. Among Japanese small and medium enterprises, AI adoption sits at 23.5%. Japan’s severe labor shortage makes the case for automation obvious. Its low adoption rate means implies an accelerated adjustment period for workers. Staff will have had less time to prepare than workers in countries where adoption has been slower but steadier. This morning’s jobs report will generate confident commentary about the resilience of the American labor market. That commentary will be accurate about the aggregate numbers and mute about labor dynamics. The 172,000 jobs added in May and the 38,579 AI-attributed cuts announced in May are both real numbers. They describe different things happening to different people at the same time. BUY NOW! [https://wimdodson.gumroad.com/l/gods_in_the_machine?_gl=1*19da5a0*_ga*MTEwMjE2MDkwMy4xNzc2OTY4MDQy*_ga_6LJN6D94N6*czE3NzY5NjgwNDEkbzEkZzEkdDE3NzY5NjgxNzIkajU5JGwwJGgw] Get the NEW Book that exposes the Narratives Tech uses to build its AI Empire. $4.95 flat fee for Kindle, Nook, Tablets, and Mobile. No subscription required.3.5-hr reading time. Get full access to The AI/Labor Report at ailabor.substack.com/subscribe [https://ailabor.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

Half the office ignores AI; Gen Z sabotages the rollout; AI disintegrating India's $283B economic flywheel; Europe's 15% AI adoption gives regulation breathing space; new employment numbers on the way

Something interesting is happening in corporate America, and it is the kind of thing that does not show up in the quarterly earnings calls where executives explain, with considerable confidence, that AI is transforming their organizations. Workers are not using the AI tools their companies bought. Listen on Apple Podcasts [https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-ai-labor-report/id1896663061] A Fortune report drawing on a 2025 Gallup survey [https://fortune.com/2026/04/09/ai-backlash-quiet-quitting-fobo-obsolete-white-collar-rebellion] found that 49% of American office workers use no AI tools at work whatsoever. Only 12% use them daily. This is, by any measure, a remarkable return on the billions of dollars companies have spent on enterprise AI licenses. A separate 2026 survey of 2,400 knowledge workers found that 29% of employees admit to actively sabotaging their company’s AI strategy. Among Gen Z employees, the generation that corporate strategists assumed would lead adoption, that figure rises to 44%. A February 2026 study found that mandated AI use is now driving resignations [https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/technology/articles/white-collar-workers-quietly-rebelling-100000372.html]. Twenty-rwo percent of workers say they would consider leaving a job rather than use AI in ways they find objectionable. Workers have coined a term for the underlying anxiety: FOBO, or Fear of Becoming Obsolete. The anxiety is not difficult to follow. Companies announcing major AI investments have, with some regularity, announced layoffs in the same earnings calls. Employees have noticed this pattern. What the CEO Says vs. What the Data Shows Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman told the Financial Times in February 2026 [https://fortune.com/article/why-microsoft-ai-chief-mustafa-suleyman-predicts-ai-automation-18-months/] that AI would achieve human-level performance on most professional tasks within 12 to 18 months. BUY NOW! [https://wimdodson.gumroad.com/l/gods_in_the_machine?_gl=1*19da5a0*_ga*MTEwMjE2MDkwMy4xNzc2OTY4MDQy*_ga_6LJN6D94N6*czE3NzY5NjgwNDEkbzEkZzEkdDE3NzY5NjgxNzIkajU5JGwwJGgw] Get the NEW Book that exposes the Narratives Tech uses to build its AI Empire. $4.95 flat fee for Kindle, Nook, Tablets, and Mobile. No subscription required.3.5-hr reading time. He named lawyers, accountants, project managers, and marketing professionals specifically. He pointed to software engineering as evidence the transformation was already well under way. He noted that Microsoft engineers now use AI-assisted coding for the vast majority of their code production. It is therefore worth examining what the controlled research shows about software engineering in particular, since that is the field Suleyman cited as his proof of concept. A randomized controlled trial published by nonprofit research organization [https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.09089] tested 16 experienced software developers performing 246 real tasks with and without AI tools. These were not interns. Each had at least five years of experience on the specific projects they were working on. AI tools made them 19% slower. The developers themselves predicted AI would speed them up by 24%. After completing the study, having just experienced a measurable slowdown, they still believed AI had helped them, estimating a 20% improvement. A follow-up analysis by engineering research firm Faros [https://www.faros.ai/blog/lab-vs-reality-ai-productivity-study-findings] found the same pattern at the organizational level: developers complete more individual tasks with AI assistance, but the organizations they work for deliver no faster. Anecdotally, programmers who make extensive use of AI-coding tools are finding they do not understand the programming structures and lines of code AI develops. Programmers are finding after several weeks of use they have to rewrite much of the code themselves to, first, understand the code as they would have written it originally; and, two, to make modifications to the AI-code base. As long as the code does not have to be modified, AI-coding tools save development time; for add-ons, modifications, and streamlining processes, humans must be in the loop. Suleyman’s 18-month timeline may yet prove correct. The current controlled evidence is running in the opposite direction, which is the kind of detail that tends to get left out of Financial Times interviews. Europe Adopts AI More Slowly Than the Coverage Suggests Eurostat data covered by Euronews in March 2026 [https://www.euronews.com/tag/work] found that while one-third of EU citizens used generative AI tools in 2025, fewer than half used them for work purposes. Actual workplace AI adoption across the EU sits at 15%. The firms facing the EU AI Act’s August 2 compliance deadline are, for the most part, running operations where the majority of employees do not use these tools in their daily work. The regulation is arriving ahead of the behavior it is designed to govern. The AI/Labor Report is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. India’s Tech Sector and the Knock-On Effects The numbers coming out of India’s IT sector are striking enough on their own. India’s IT and business process management industry generates $283 billion annually and accounts for more than 7% of GDP. Niti Aayog, India’s national planning commission, projects [https://startuptalky.com/ai-in-hr-india-future-of-jobs-reskilling-gap-78-million-jobs/]that tech headcount may fall from between 7.5 and 8 million workers today to 6 million by 2031. But there may be a knock-on effect beyond the technology industry in the form of a “flywheel effect.” High-wage IT jobs generate spending across real estate, education, restaurants, retail, and consumer services in the cities where those workers live. CNBC’s Inside India newsletter documented [https://www.cnbc.com/2026/04/30/ai-threat-indias-growth-story-jobs.html] how as those service jobs dissolve, the IT sector that focuses on the domestic market will shrink as well. Shrinkage further impacts the number of workers in the sectors dependent on IT-worker spend. A Counterpoint Worth Taking Seriously The European Central Bank surveyed 5,000 European firms in March 2026 [https://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/blog/date/2026/html/ecb.blog20260304~d9e34fc95f.en.html] and found that companies adopting AI in Europe are currently more likely to increase hiring than reduce it. This stands in direct contrast to U.S. and UK data. The ECB researchers noted the result is provisional. European labor market institutions make aggressive restructuring harder. European AI adoption lags the U.S. by an estimated 18 to 24 months, so hiring numbers may be different within two years. New Payroll Numbers ADP released its May employment report this morning [https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/03/adp-jobs-report-may-2026-payrolls-increase-by-122000.html]. It showed 122,000 private-sector jobs added, the best month since January 2025. Eight of ten sectors gained. The information sector lost 9,000 jobs, a figure CNBC described directly as a possible AI impact. Pay for job-stayers rose 4.4% year-over-year. The official BLS nonfarm payrolls report for May publishes tomorrow at 8:30 a.m. Wall Street’s consensus is 80,000 jobs added. Capital Economics forecasts as few as 65,000. Federal Reserve officials will use the result in their June 16-17 policy meeting [https://www.kiplinger.com/investing/economy/this-weeks-economic-calendar]. The information sector’s continued contraction will be the figure worth watching, whatever the headline number turns out to be. BUY NOW [https://wimdodson.gumroad.com/l/invasion_ai?_gl=1*g1iey2*_ga*OTc1NjU2NTcyLjE3NzQwMzA3NjM.*_ga_6LJN6D94N6*czE3NzQwMzMyMjUkbzIkZzEkdDE3NzQwMzQ2ODgkajYwJGwwJGgw]! Get the book that examines how the AI invasion already happened. You just weren’t invited. $9.95 flat fee for Kindle, Nook, Tablets, and Mobile. No subscription required. 2-hr reading time. 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