AI Is Really Really Taking Jobs Today

AI Is Really Really Taking Jobs Today

Douglas A. McIntyre

Wed, September 2, 2026 at 7:32 PM GMT+3 4 min read

Quick Read

• Dallas Fed research confirms GenAI is actively displacing medical, legal, accounting, and coding workers, with recent college graduates disproportionately impacted.

• AI-driven job losses could push U.S. unemployment from 4% to 10%, matching Great Recession peaks and displacing roughly 10 million workers.

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Will AI take jobs, or is the claim just a mirage? New data from the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas shows that AI as a human replacement has started and is accelerating. The jobs being taken match many forecasts of vulnerable sectors. The information also indicates the job destruction will spread.

In a new research paper titled "Job postings show early signs of AI automation impact," the authors report, "A new analysis, using data from millions of online job postings, shows GenAI is reshaping labor demand in Texas."

The research began measuring data in 2022, around the time ChatGPT was released. The researchers filtered out other downsizing reasons, as well as company departures or arrivals in the region. The data focused on automatable jobs that GenAI can replace.

The medical field was affected primarily because of technical jobs that involved evaluating and moving records. What was the ultimate measure across all industries? "The measure maps job tasks in the O*NET database—a comprehensive list of approximately 1,000 common occupations in the U.S. economy and the tasks they perform—to tasks performed using Anthropic's Claude platform, a leading AI assistant and family of large language models." (O*NET is a job management tool) Jobs that AI could do and that could be affected made up about 2.6% of the workforce. The data came partially from job postings.

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Recent college graduates appear to be affected more than most other groups. Other research has shown that employment in entry-level white-collar jobs will be negatively affected. Goldman Sachs believes AI could cost 6% to 7% of Americans their jobs. Legal jobs, accounting jobs, and coders have often been on these lists.

As for retail jobs, the University of Delaware puts retail job losses at six million to seven and a half million.

Taken together, across all of these industries, job loss could certainly be 10 million people. The US labor workforce is 161 million people. Employment changes across these sectors would put 6% of Americans out of work. The unemployment rate today is just over 4%. Together, a 10% unemployment rate would match the worst level during the Great Recession. This means AI could cause an economic disaster not seen since the Great Depression.

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