LinkedIn data shows hiring decline is not driven by AI

LinkedIn, the professional networking site owned by Microsoft, has reported a global hiring decline of around 20% since 2022. Speaking this week at the Semafor World Economy summit, Blake Lawit, LinkedIn’s chief global affairs and legal officer, explicitly pushed back against the narrative that artificial intelligence is the primary driver of this global slowdown. Instead, Lawit asserted that the decline in hiring is more closely tied to a rise in interest rates. He noted that while hiring is down globally, the company’s data does not currently show AI as the cause of the decline. The interview highlighted how interest rates, rather than AI, are currently shaping the global employment landscape.

To analyze these labor trends, the company relies on its “economic graph”—LinkedIn’s internal data structure containing members, companies, jobs, and skills—which currently tracks over a billion members. Lawit described this graph as a real-time view of what is happening in the labor market. He explained that LinkedIn analyzed this data specifically to address whether AI is impacting jobs right now, but found no evidence of such an impact. “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,” Lawit said.

While AI is not currently to blame for the global hiring slump, LinkedIn’s data indicates that the nature of work is already shifting. According to Lawit, the skills needed to do the average job have changed 25% over the last several years. Looking ahead, LinkedIn expects the skills required for the average job to change 70% by 2030 due to AI. Lawit warned that this shift will affect workers even if they remain in their current roles, noting that even if a person is not changing jobs, their job is changing on them. He added that although things could change in the future, the current data does not support the idea that AI is driving the hiring decline.

Why it matters

While the tech industry is fixated on AI as the primary disruptor of labor, LinkedIn’s data suggests that macroeconomic factors like interest rates are currently the dominant force shaping global hiring trends.