Hiring is slowing and unemployment rates are rising. Who — or what — is to blame?
Companies say artificial intelligence has increased productivity by removing tedious and unnecessary tasks. Workers say the new technology is replacing entry-level jobs, upending stable career paths, and rejecting job applications within minutes of their submission.
Researchers, however, think the role of AI in today’s job market is just misunderstood.
Tamara Ward, a Prince George’s County resident, accepted a buyout from the U.S. Department of Agriculture in October. She said she applied for more than 700 jobs.
Ward received little interest from hiring managers, and a lot of the roles did not compare favorably with her past jobs in scope or pay. She blames AI.
“The software is screening us out before a human being even has the opportunity to see us,” Ward said. “I honestly believe reliable candidates, including myself, are being excluded from consideration.”
Experiences like Ward’s are common in today’s job market. Still, researchers from the University of Maryland-LinkUp AI Maps Project found “there is no empirical evidence that AI is reducing overall labor market demand.”
The findings are part of a collaborative project between LinkUp, an employment data company; Outrigger Group, a business advisory firm; and the university’s Robert H. Smith School of Business.
Researchers used their own advanced AI system to analyze 155 million U.S. job postings between 2018 and 2025. What they found sounds exactly like what AI would want them to think: “There is no widespread AI-driven job loss.”
Other factors are at play: Companies are rightsizing after overhiring during the COVID-19 pandemic and they’re grappling with tariffs, high interest rates and high oil prices. America is also in a “low hire, low fire” job market, former Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said last year, leading to fewer job postings overall.
“But the explanation is not AI,” said Anil Gupta, a professor at the University of Maryland and co-lead of the project.
Zack Mabel, a research professor and the director of research at the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce, was not part of the research team. He said it’s too soon to tell how AI is permeating the economy and society, noting that job postings are becoming less accurate proxies for actual hiring patterns.
“There’s a large disconnect right now between the potential that AI has in terms of transforming the types of work that people do, the types of jobs that are available to people, and how it is actually disrupting the economy, if at all,” Mabel said.
Fresh graduates and young workers have the most to gain from adopting AI, the research found. Entry-level job postings made up nearly 13% of listings in 2025, up from under 12%.
An increasing number of those jobs mention AI skills.
That’s perfect for Prince Michael Kemani, a student at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, studying computer science and statistics. He hopes to become a machine learning engineer, which means someone who designs AI systems.
He’s already using AI in school and says a lot of his peers are too. Employers are encouraging it, as are his professors.
“I’ve had interviews where they’ve literally asked me about my habits using AI to code, and it’s important because if you can’t use AI, then you can’t do work fast enough,” Kemani said. “AI isn’t taking over the job of people who know how to code. It’s taking the job of people who don’t code without it.”
This year’s college graduations were something of a reality check — and maybe a gut punch — for companies that want to push AI onto young workers.
Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt was among a few commencement speakers who were booed by soon-to-be graduates for mentioning the technology.
Young workers are still struggling to land entry-level roles. The unemployment rate for 20- to 24-year-olds has long bounced between 5.5% and 8%, but it reached 9.2% last fall, a high not seen since the pandemic.
If AI isn’t impacting younger workers, what is?
Research economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York point to the rise of remote work.
When companies closed their offices for more than a year during the COVID-19 pandemic, employers were more likely to hire experienced, tenured workers and were reluctant to hire fresh graduates for remote roles “because it is more difficult to teach them the requisite skills from afar,” researchers found.
Workers have since returned to the office at least a few days a week, if not all five days. But hiring trends have not shifted with the change.
AI has, however, triggered a change in the types of jobs that are available.
Experienced workers and fresh graduates need to be open to learning how to use AI to survive what Gupta called a reshaping labor market.
More than 1% of jobs required technical AI skills at the end of 2025, up from less than a quarter of a percent when OpenAI’s ChatGPT launched in late 2022.
Ward changed how she thought about her future as AI kept popping up in job descriptions. “I’d better get on board and get AI literacy skills so I can bring something to the table that other communicators cannot,” she said.
Ward is pursuing a master’s degree in artificial intelligence for business at the University of Baltimore and runs her own business, AI Literacy for Students, a program that teaches high schoolers critical thinking skills about AI-generated content.
“AI, it’s here,” Gupta said. “It’s not going anywhere, and it’s like a tsunami that’s going to keep coming.”
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