Don’t blame AI yet for poor jobs numbers, analysts say
The US economy shed 92,000 jobs in February, a dramatic downturn from analyst expectations that it would add about 50,000 jobs. The shortfall stoked growing fears that AI could be contributing to higher unemployment.
Job analysts Challenger, Gray & Christmas said artificial intelligence was explicitly cited as the reason behind 4,680 job cuts in February, approximately 10 percent of total announced cuts for the month. So far in 2026, AI has been cited as the cause in 12,304 job cut announcements, or 8 percent of job cut plans, they wrote in a blog published the day before the employment numbers were released.
The analysts said in 2025, companies cited AI as the cause of 54,836 announced layoff plans, 5 percent of total cuts during the year. Since 2023, AI has been cited in 91,753 job cut announcements, approximately 3 percent of all layoff plans announced in that period.
“Tech is responding to a number of pressures right now. AI is the big story, but there are also global regulatory concerns, a slowdown in digital advertising driven by tariffs and economic uncertainty, and higher costs to both employ workers and access funding, forcing companies to make difficult decisions,” wrote Andy Challenger, workplace expert and chief revenue officer at Challenger, Gray & Christmas.
Last week, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey announced his company Block would lay off 4,000 workers, or 40 percent of its staff, citing AI as the culprit.
Gina Bolvin of Boston-based Bolvin Wealth Management told The Register that while she felt Friday’s jobs report was fraught due to a healthcare worker strike in California, and possible lingering impacts from the government shutdown, AI does appear to be dampening hiring and causing a slowdown in the job market.
“I think AI disruption is still going to be a theme for this year, but I do think that the software selloff is overblown,” she said. “Robots have been trying to take over the world for 20 or 30 years now, right?”
Bankrate senior economic analyst Mark Hamrick called the jobs report “ugly,” but he felt AI had minimal impact on the overall numbers.
“There are people questioning whether artificial intelligence is a part of that. I think that’s a minimal impact,” he said during a television appearance on Friday. “We saw information workers decline by 10,000 and we don’t have reason to argue at this point that the negative impacts of AI with respect to employment outweigh the potential positive impacts where you have so much business capital expenditures going into that area of the economy, and that includes the datacenter buildout as well.”
Digging into the US Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers shows that between January and February, jobs in “computing infrastructure providers, data processing, web hosting, and related services” were down 300, but year over year that category has lost 4,400 jobs.
US-based computer and electronic product manufacturing has also suffered losses, dropping 700 jobs from January to February and 16,900 jobs year over year. US-based semiconductor and other electronic component manufacturing saw 1,000 jobs cut between January and February, but 17,200 lost year over year.
As an overall industry, “professional and business services” dropped 5,000 jobs between January and February, and lost 88,000 year over year. Of those 88,000 losses, computer systems design and related services accounted for 34,600 fewer jobs between February 2025 and February 2026.
Administrative and support services lost 18,800 jobs from January to February, but were off 122,100 jobs year over year, from 8,556,800 in February 2025 to 8,434,700 last month.
While several categories of health care workers were down roughly 30,000 from January to February, many of those job categories were still higher than they were a year ago, and economists cited ongoing labor actions in California as a driver. ®
