Employment has always acted as a proxy for where society is headed.
In 1900, 40% of the labor force lay in agriculture; today it’s under 2%. In 1970, about a quarter of Americans were employed in manufacturing; now it’s less than 8%. These numbers tell a story: when agriculture dominated, hands were needed in the fields; but by the mid-20th century, it was factories and assembly lines.
Last week, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released its Employment Projections and Occupational Outlook Handbook. It paints a picture of the U.S.’s next decade, one defined by the rising electricity needs to power the AI economy.
AI-based services and development are expected to drive the need for more workers in both the professional, scientific, and technical services sector (+7.5%) and the information sector (+6.5%). As AI fuels increased demand for electricity, the four fastest-growing industries for the next decade are all energy-related—solar, wind, geothermal, and other electric power generation are expected to add 41,600 jobs over the next decade. Yet, this pales in comparison to the 528,500 new jobs expected to be added in the service sector to care for our aging population.
While no one has crystal clear clairvoyance to share what the future may hold, the BLS has traditionally been a solid place to start. Yet even with teams composed of top researchers and behemoths of data, the BLS acknowledges that AI has created a Wild West of sorts, and that the future rate of technological progress could be higher than in the past, making the exact impact on the labor market “impossible to predict with precision.” The BLS noted, history shows technology tends to reshape occupations gradually, not overnight—despite the louder claims of AI-job-apocalypse doomsayers.
Today, we examine the promise and peril of enterprise companies adopting AI for critical business use cases–and how business leaders are implementing protocols to manage risks.
—The Editors
