March 26, 2025
The Surprising Benefits of “Cooperative” AI
The Impact of AI on Work Quality and Collaboration: Insights from a Harvard Business School Study One of the great promises of the artificial intelligence era is the potential of the technology to democratize skill. Just as the internet and personal digital technology made it possible for us to instantly access the sum of all human knowledge, AI is creating…
March 25, 2025
AI Talent: It’s Not Just for High Tech Anymore
We appear to be approaching the break-out phase of artificial intelligence’s diffusion across the American economy. As reported in the Wall Street Journal, recent data from the University of Maryland’s AI job tracker finds that nearly 25 percent of tech job postings earlier this year mentioned AI skills. And it isn’t just the tech sector that’s hiring—finance, professional…
March 19, 2025
AI and Jobs: Measuring Impact and Building New Assessment Tools
Event Summary On March 19, AEI’s Brent Orrell and Shane Tews hosted a panel discussion featuring Alex Tamkin, an AI researcher at Anthropic, and Jason Owen-Smith, a sociologist at the University of Michigan, on how AI is shaping the labor market and workforce development policy. The conversation was moderated by Axios reporter Ashley Gold. The…
March 12, 2025
Stop and Go
Automated driving is picking up speed. Several years ago there was a bit of a moral panic about the prospect of automated freight transportation replacing human truck drivers. These concerns were, in part, about the prospect of automating yet another large and important industry that was dominated by noncollege, male workers. The issue faded from…
March 6, 2025
America’s New Frontier of Opportunity and Inclusion
It would be a king-sized understatement to say that diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives have had better weeks, months, years, and decades than they are currently experiencing. From the Supreme Court’s ruling that banned affirmative action in admissions, to the Trump administration’s full-scale bureaucratic offensive to expunge DEI from federal policy and programs, to corporate America’s widespread retreat from years…
March 3, 2025
Up in the Air
For whom is the bell tolling? When it comes to the leading-edge impacts of artificial intelligence (AI) on the workforce the answer appears to be well-paid, middle managers at some of the nation’s leading high-tech firms. As the Financial Times reported late last week, Amazon has announced the elimination of nearly 14,000 jobs concentrated in the ranks…
February 27, 2025
Powering AI: The Energy Workforce Crisis No One Is Talking About
We are used to thinking about how burgeoning artificial intelligence (AI) may affect jobs and employment. Usually, this means fixating on whether or not AI systems will replace or augment human labor. What is less often considered is the way AI will, and in fact already does, spur new demand for labor that has nothing…
February 25, 2025
Go Fast, Break HR
How the AI talent race is reshaping recruitment. A new survey of 250 technical leaders reveals a striking paradox: Companies are dramatically increasing AI investments—some by up to 75 percent in 2025—while simultaneously finding a talent well that is running dry. Ninety-four percent of tech leaders identify talent shortages as their primary barrier to AI innovation, and…
February 24, 2025
AI and American Dynamism
Last year, I published a report, The Age of Uncertainty, on the challenges in understanding and estimating the job and skill impacts of artificial intelligence. One of the big problems was how quickly expert estimates become outdated, not due to any fault on the part of the experts, but because of how rapidly AI is evolving….
February 11, 2025
AI and the Future of Work Looks Bright
One of the hottest guessing games in workforce development is figuring out how generative artificial intelligence will affect jobs and how to prepare students and workers for an AI-infused economy. The future of work looks bright, but the full potential of AI to increase productivity and raise wages and incomes will only be realized if…