The employment effects of artificial intelligence (AI) are mixed: some companies that invest heavily in AI report headcount growth, while others attribute job cuts to AI. By May 2026, firms had announced nearly 90,000 job eliminations linked to AI, and some estimates suggest AI could replace up to 15% of jobs in the United States over the next five years.
What Ramp and Revelio Labs found
Reports from Ramp and Revelio Labs provide a more nuanced picture. Ramp tracks companies' AI spending, while Revelio Labs monitors workforce data for about 22,000 firms. Their analysis shows that companies spending substantially on AI tend to expand faster — including in entry-level roles.
- The study labels “high-intensity adopters” firms that averaged $30 per employee per month in AI spending during the first three months. Those companies saw an average 10.2% increase in headcount.
- Employment rose across many functions: engineering, sales, administrative, customer support, finance, marketing and research roles all increased.
- The strongest gains among high-intensity adopters occurred in the information sector, which includes software development, internet, media and other tech-adjacent companies.
The reports note that AI can lower or speed up core activities at software and technology firms — for example, writing code, debugging, building internal tools, producing technical documentation and supporting product development — and these lower production costs can improve the return on broader company expansion, not just engineering teams.
Limitations and risks
Several important caveats temper the optimistic signals:
- The sample is heavily skewed toward technology-oriented, knowledge-work companies, many of which are venture-backed and already on rapid growth trajectories. This makes it difficult to determine whether AI spending itself drives hiring or whether AI simply appears at firms that would have grown anyway.
- The study authors explicitly state: “This study does not prove that AI creates jobs in all cases,” while also rejecting the claim that AI will lead to widespread, universal job loss.
- Firms that merely purchase subscriptions or run pilot projects without making sustained internal AI investments typically do not see headcount increases, according to the reports.
These observations suggest the gap may widen between companies that have the resources — capital, engineering staff, founder networks and managerial capacity — to turn AI adoption into real business outcomes and those that remain at the subscription or pilot stage.
Broader labour-market signals: Goldman Sachs
Comparing Ramp/Revelio findings with other data is important. Goldman Sachs estimates that over the past year AI has already caused a net loss of about 16,000 jobs per month, with Gen Z and entry-level workers the largest casualties. At the same time, the Ramp/Revelio analysis finds that entry-level headcount at technology-oriented firms rose by 12%.
This dual picture indicates that AI's impact depends strongly on sector, company type and available resources: in some firms and industries it can spur hiring, while in others it contributes to job reductions.
Conclusions
Available evidence does not support a single, universal conclusion about whether AI primarily creates jobs. Ramp and Revelio Labs show that higher AI investment often coincides with headcount growth, particularly at well-funded technology companies. Yet Goldman Sachs and other sources documenting net job losses warn that AI diffusion can also produce employment declines, especially among less-resourced firms and entry-level workers.
Authors of the studies warn that differences in AI adoption capability could deepen economic divides: companies starting from a stronger resource position are likelier to capture the benefits of AI, while others risk falling further behind.
(Sources: Ramp, Revelio Labs, Goldman Sachs — reporting summarized from TechCrunch.)
