In an interview this week at the Semafor World Economy summit, Blake Lawit, the chief global affairs and legal officer of the Microsoft-owned professional networking site LinkedIn, revealed that the company’s statistics indicates a 20% decrease in hiring since 2022. He rejected the notion that AI was to blame, though.
During his interview he sated that:
“At LinkedIn… we have an economic graph which is over a billion members. We’ve got companies, jobs, skills. It’s really an amazing real-time view of what’s happening in the labor market. And we’ve looked — because everyone wants to know the answer to this question: Is AI impacting jobs right now? We’ve looked and, honestly, we haven’t seen it.”
Rather, the executive proposed that a rise in interest rates was more directly linked to the drop in hiring.
Lawit continued and said:
“We have not seen the sort of impacts that you would expect to see in areas that everyone is talking about AI… like industries, whether or not it’s customer support, or administrative, or marketing — all these places that if we were seeing impacts [from] AI that’s where it would be”.
He also added:
“Yes, hiring’s down, but not down more”.
Lawit said that when compared to individuals who were in the middle or later stages of their careers, LinkedIn’s statistics did not show that the reduction in hiring of college-aged young adults landing their first jobs was “down more.” He did not, however, discount the possibility that things might change.
“Doesn’t mean it’s not going to happen in the future, but not yet.”
But Lawit had a sort of warning about that. The abilities required to perform the typical job have changed by 25% over the past few years, according to Lawit. LinkedIn projects that percentage to reach 70% by 2030 due to the growth of AI.
He stated that:
“So, even if you’re not changing jobs, your job’s changing on you”.
