Concerns about artificial intelligence and its impact on the job market have been growing, and a new study adds fresh evidence to the debate. A recent working paper by Stanford economists Erik Brynjolfsson, Bharat Chandar, and Ruyu Chen finds that early-career employees in AI-exposed fields have seen a 13% drop in employment since 2022, compared with more experienced workers in the same industries and with workers in sectors less affected by the rapidly emerging technology.
“These large language models are trained on books, articles and written material found on the internet and elsewhere,” Brynjolfsson told CBS MoneyWatch. “That’s the kind of book learning that a lot of people get at universities before they enter the job market, so there is a lot of overlap between these LLMs and the knowledge young people have.”
READ: Nvidia plans new Blackwell AI chip for China (
The study shows that AI has made a significant impact in two fields — software engineering, and customer service. Entry-level employment in these two areas declined by roughly 20%, according to the report, while employment for older workers in the same jobs grew between late 2022 and 2025.
Overall, employment for workers aged 22 to 25 in the most AI-exposed sectors dropped 6% during the study period. By comparison, employment in those areas rose between 6% and 9% for older workers, according to the researchers. A similar pattern has been observed in the fields of accounting and auditing, secretarial and administrative work, computer programming and sales.
“Older workers have a lot of tacit knowledge because they learn tricks of trade from experience that may never be written down anywhere,” Brynjolfsson explained. “They have knowledge that’s not in the LLMs, so they’re not being replaced as much by them.”
Employment for workers of all ages in fields less exposed to AI, has mostly remained steady, or grown. Jobs for young health aides, for example, rose faster than their older counterparts.
The Stanford researchers used data from ADP, which provides payroll processing services to employers with a combined 25 million workers, to track employment changes for full-time workers in occupations that are or more or less exposed to AI. The data included detailed information on workers, including their ages, and precise job titles.
Brynjolfsson said that AI doesn’t “just threaten to take jobs away from workers,” but “as with past cycles of innovation, it will render some jobs extinct while creating others.” “Tech has always been destroying jobs and creating jobs. There has always been this turnover,” he said.
“There is a transition over time, and that’s what we are seeing now,” he said. He also added that workers using AI tools to “augment their work,” are benefitting from the AI boom.