A report published by Microsoft last year seemed a tough read for workers. The company, which has invested billions into OpenAI, analysed hundreds of thousands of conversations with its Co-Pilot chatbot and derived from those that AI could do 90% of the work of historians and coders, 80% of the work of salespeople and journalists... the list stretched on. But if that’s true, where have the AI job cuts actually happened? In 2025, the Financial Times said that in the US, UK, and Western Europe, AI adoption by companies didn’t seem to correlate to job losses (though it may have affected some online gig work). And on 7 January, Oxford Economics published a study that said “firms don’t appear to be replacing workers with AI on a significant scale and we doubt that unemployment rates will be pushed up heavily by AI over the next few years”. Why don’t these researchers think AI is taking our jobs? The study did not say that cuts aren’t happening . They just said that their data didn’t show many of those job losses came from AI directly replacing employees, and even suggested that mass firings were being presented as AI-related so that bosses could look better to investors. In fact, they say, many of the “anecdotes” about AI job losses are “based on correlation”; eg, graduate jobs dropped as ChatGPT became popular, but that doesn’t necessarily mean one caused the other. “While a rising number of firms are pinning job losses on AI, other more traditional drivers of job layoffs are far more commonly cited,” the report reads. “What’s more, we suspect some firms are trying to dress up layoffs as a good news story rather than bad news, such as past over-hiring.” How much has AI actually affected the job market, per this research? Overall, they say that AI has been cited as the cause for about 4.5% of job losses in 2025; economic and market reasons were blamed over four times more often. And again, the researchers weren’t convinced that even that 4.5% figure is entirely accurate. “Linking job losses to increased AI usage rather than other negative factors like weak demand or excessive hiring in the past conveys a more positive message to investors,” they said. Additionally, the authors said that some AI-related job cuts are down to companies experimenting with the tech, not an out-and-out employee replacement. “Firms are understandably desperate to ensure that they harness AI to cut costs if at all possible and are thus keen to experiment. Sectors where there are potentially the most easy wins from AI adoption have a greater incentive to put the new technology to the test. “To finance this, budgets for other parts of the business, including wages, may have to be cut. While there may be [a] causal link between greater AI spending and reduced headcounts in some sectors, this doesn’t necessarily mean AI has replaced workers,” they wrote. There are also some reports of companies “quietly” rehiring staff they initially tried to replace with AI. They aren’t convinced AI has made us more productive, either They also noted that much of the promised AI productivity boom has yet to appear in the data. “If AI were already replacing labour at scale, productivity growth should be accelerating,” the report said, adding, “generally, it isn’t . “Productivity growth rates in other major advanced economies have also been largely unexceptional,” it continued. “This supports our view that, for now, greater AI use is more experimental in nature and isn’t yet replacing workers on a major scale.” Does this mean AI will never affect unemployment rates? No. The paper simply says that this data means mass AI-related unemployment is a possibility rather than an “inevitability”. They ended, “The upshot is that while there’s clearly evidence of fast adoption of AI technologies by some firms already, and signs of some job losses related to AI in specific parts of the economy, the macro-level impact is much more limited. “We don’t yet see any compelling evidence to make substantial upward adjustment to our forecasts for either near-term productivity or unemployment in response to ongoing AI developments.” Related... X Has Taken Action On Grok's Image Generation After Backlash. Here's What You Need To Know Opinion: From AI To ChatGPT To Deepfakes: Are We Losing Our Grasp On Reality? James Cameron On Dangers Of Artificial Intelligence: ‘I Warned You Guys In 1984!'