{"id":116237,"date":"2026-09-20T20:12:54","date_gmt":"2026-09-21T00:12:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/?p=116237"},"modified":"2026-09-20T20:12:54","modified_gmt":"2026-09-21T00:12:54","slug":"will-ai-replace-workers-what-employers-did","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/bgodinspired-news\/bgodinspired-business-news\/will-ai-replace-workers-what-employers-did\/","title":{"rendered":"Will AI Replace Workers? What Employers Actually Did"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class='booster-block booster-read-block'>\n                <div class=\"twp-read-time\">\n                \t<i class=\"booster-icon twp-clock\"><\/i> <span>Read Time:<\/span>10 Minute, 35 Second                <\/div>\n\n            <\/div><p>A new tool arrives at work. In about four seconds it does the thing that used to take somebody all morning.<\/p>\n\n<p>Nobody says anything out loud. Everybody thinks the same sentence.<\/p>\n\n<p>That sentence now has a number attached to it, and two separate sets of researchers spent this year measuring it from opposite ends. One asked workers what they were afraid of. The other asked employers what they had actually done. The two answers do not match, and the gap between them is the most useful thing anyone has published about AI and jobs this year.<\/p>\n\n<h2>The fear has quietly changed shape<\/h2>\n\n<p>Gallup asked US workers about this in its Work and Education survey, fielded from 3 to 24 August 2026. Twenty-seven percent said they worry that technology could soon make their jobs obsolete. That is the highest figure Gallup has recorded, up seven points in a single year, and roughly double the 13% who said it in 2017.<\/p>\n\n<p>Worth knowing the size of that: it comes from 1,200 US adults, 507 of whom were working. It is a snapshot of one country, not the world.<\/p>\n\n<p>But here is the part that almost nobody picked up. In the same survey, worry about being laid off sat at 24%. Worry about reduced hours was 21%. Lower wages, also 21%.<\/p>\n\n<p>Which means that for the first time in that data, more US workers are afraid of becoming unnecessary than are afraid of being let go.<\/p>\n\n<p>Those are not the same fear, and it is worth being precise about why. A layoff is something that happens to you. It has a date on it, and a reason, and usually a budget line behind it. Being obsolete feels like something you <em>are<\/em>. It reads less like a business decision and more like a verdict.<\/p>\n\n<p>The split by age says something too: 34% of workers aged 18 to 44 carried that worry, against 19% of workers 45 and over. The people with the most working years left are the ones most convinced those years are the problem.<\/p>\n\n<p>If that quiet dread sounds familiar, it is showing up in other workplace numbers as well &#8211; we wrote recently about how <a href=\"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/bgodinspired-news\/bgodinspired-business-news\/employee-engagement-drivers-belonging-fell\/\">belonging and feeling valued fell from the top of what employees want to the bottom<\/a>, which is what tends to happen when people stop asking to be appreciated and start bracing instead.<\/p>\n\n<div class=\"convertkit-form wp-block-convertkit-form\" style=\"\"><script async data-uid=\"6491fb8269\" src=\"https:\/\/bgodinspired.kit.com\/6491fb8269\/index.js\" data-jetpack-boost=\"ignore\" data-no-defer=\"1\" data-no-optimize=\"1\" nowprocket><\/script><\/div>\n\n\n<h2>Will AI replace workers? What employers reported doing<\/h2>\n\n<p>The Federal Reserve Bank of New York runs two regional business surveys &#8211; the Empire State Manufacturing Survey and the Business Leaders Survey. In August 2026 it used them to ask firms in New York State and northern New Jersey a plain question: what has AI actually done to your workforce?<\/p>\n\n<p>That is one region in one month, not a picture of the world economy. Read it as a close-up, not a map. But it is a close-up of employers answering about their own behaviour rather than commentators guessing at it, and those are rare.<\/p>\n\n<p>First, adoption. Sixty-one percent of service firms reported using AI, up from 40% a year earlier. Among manufacturers it was 51%, up from 26%. Manufacturing adoption roughly doubled in twelve months.<\/p>\n\n<p>So the tools genuinely arrived. Then what happened to the people?<\/p>\n\n<ul>\n<li>Just over a third of service firms, and more than 20% of manufacturers, reported <strong>retraining<\/strong> workers in response to AI.<\/li>\n<li>Four percent of service firms reported <strong>laying off<\/strong> workers because of AI. Among manufacturers, none did.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n<p>Among the service firms in that survey, retraining outran layoffs by roughly eight to one.<\/p>\n\n<p>The layoff figure did rise &#8211; it was 1% of service firms the year before. That is a real increase and it should not be waved away. It is simply much smaller than the thing everyone is picturing.<\/p>\n\n<h2>The number almost nobody quotes<\/h2>\n\n<p>Thirteen percent of service firms said they hired <em>more<\/em> workers to help them get value out of AI.<\/p>\n\n<p>Fifteen percent said they hired fewer people than they otherwise would have.<\/p>\n\n<p>Those two numbers sit almost on top of each other. In that survey, the firms adding people because of AI nearly cancelled out the firms holding back because of it &#8211; and both were dwarfed by the firms whose main response was to teach the staff they already had.<\/p>\n\n<p>That fits something we have looked at before on the software side: capability arriving is not the same as usefulness arriving. When the tools got easy, we found that <a href=\"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/personal-growth-and-life-skills\/ai-killer-apps-more-apps-few-downloads\/\">app listings grew about ten times faster than downloads did<\/a>. Making became cheap. Knowing what was worth making did not. A tool that can produce anything still needs someone who knows what should exist &#8211; and that someone has to be trained, not installed.<\/p>\n\n<h2>The catch worth being honest about<\/h2>\n\n<p>&#8220;We hired fewer people than we otherwise would have&#8221; is displacement that never appears in any layoff statistic.<\/p>\n\n<p>There is no announcement. No severance. No date. The job simply never gets posted, and nobody outside the company ever knows it was going to exist. It is invisible by design.<\/p>\n\n<p>And it does not fall evenly. It falls hardest on the people trying to get in &#8211; the first job, the foot in the door, the role that used to be how you learned the trade. The Fed&#8217;s own write-up points toward research suggesting entry-level workers may be affected significantly.<\/p>\n\n<p>The researchers also put a clear limit on their own finding. AI technology and its applications, they noted, are still evolving rapidly, and these patterns could shift as adoption matures.<\/p>\n\n<p>So the honest version of all this is narrow: <em>this<\/em> is what employers in one region said they did in 2026. It is not a forecast, and anyone selling it to you as one &#8211; in either direction &#8211; is adding something the data does not contain.<\/p>\n\n<h2>What the fear is actually about<\/h2>\n\n<p>Go back to that 27% for a moment, because it is measuring something stranger than money.<\/p>\n\n<p>Someone afraid of a layoff is afraid of losing income. That is frightening, but it is a problem with a shape &#8211; you can budget against it, apply against it, borrow against it. Someone afraid of obsolescence is afraid of something you cannot apply against. They are not worried about losing their pay. They are worried about being surplus.<\/p>\n\n<p>Which is a strange thing to be able to feel about yourself, when you think about it. It means somewhere along the way we started quietly measuring our worth in output &#8211; and a machine that can produce more output than you can looks, from that angle, like a judgement.<\/p>\n\n<p>There is an old image in scripture of a potter at a wheel. The clay goes wrong under the hands &#8211; collapses, or comes out misshapen, or simply refuses to hold the form it was being given. And the potter does not sweep it into the bin. The hands stay on it. It gets made again, into something else, out of exactly the same clay.<\/p>\n\n<p>The quiet claim buried in that picture is that the clay&#8217;s worth was never in the shape it happened to be holding.<\/p>\n\n<p>Which is more or less what those employers did, without meaning anything by it. Faced with people whose old shape had stopped working, the most common thing they did was not discard them. It was to put their hands back on and make them again.<\/p>\n\n<h2>What you can actually do with this<\/h2>\n\n<p>Not much of this is in your control, so it is worth naming the small part that is.<\/p>\n\n<p><strong>Learn the thing that frightens you, badly, for twenty minutes.<\/strong> Not to master it. Just to stop it being a rumour. Most of what people fear about these tools is the version they have only heard about. Twenty minutes with the actual thing usually shrinks it to a size you can look at.<\/p>\n\n<p><strong>Notice which part of your work is the judgement.<\/strong> Every job contains some portion that is execution and some portion that is deciding what is worth executing. The surveys suggest firms are paying to keep the second part and teach it new tools. That part is worth knowing about yourself before anyone asks.<\/p>\n\n<p><strong>Do not let the question &#8220;am I still needed?&#8221; go unanswered for months.<\/strong> It is a question that grows in the dark. If your sense of your own worth has quietly attached itself to your output, that is worth pulling out and looking at directly &#8211; our free <a href=\"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/what-is-my-purpose\/\">What Is My Purpose? assessment<\/a> is a reasonable place to start, and it takes a few minutes.<\/p>\n\n<p>The tools are going to keep arriving. That part is settled. What is not settled &#8211; what was never actually settled, in any year, by any technology &#8211; is whether the worth of a person is the same thing as the usefulness of their current tasks.<\/p>\n\n<p>Employers in one corner of one country spent 2026 voting, mostly with retraining budgets, for the answer that those two things are not the same.<\/p>\n\n<p>It is a small piece of evidence. But it is pointing the right way.<\/p>\n\n<h2>Questions People Are Asking<\/h2>\n\n<h3>Will AI replace workers?<\/h3>\n\n<p>Based on employer-reported data so far, large-scale replacement is not what has happened. In the Federal Reserve Bank of New York&#8217;s August 2026 regional business surveys, 4% of service firms said they had laid off workers because of AI and no manufacturers reported AI-driven layoffs, while just over a third of service firms and more than 20% of manufacturers reported retraining workers instead. The surveys covered firms in New York State and northern New Jersey, and the researchers noted that these patterns could shift as AI adoption matures.<\/p>\n\n<h3>How many workers are worried AI will make their job obsolete?<\/h3>\n\n<p>In Gallup&#8217;s Work and Education survey, fielded 3 to 24 August 2026, 27% of US workers said they worry technology could soon make their jobs obsolete. That was a record high in Gallup&#8217;s data, up seven percentage points from the previous year and roughly double the 13% recorded in 2017. The figure comes from a survey of 1,200 US adults, 507 of whom were employed.<\/p>\n\n<h3>Are workers more afraid of AI than of being laid off?<\/h3>\n\n<p>In Gallup&#8217;s August 2026 survey, yes. Worry about technology making a job obsolete stood at 27%, higher than worry about being laid off at 24%, reduced hours at 21% and lower wages at 21%. Only worry about cuts to benefits was higher, at 33%. This applies to US workers surveyed in that period and is not necessarily true of other countries or other years.<\/p>\n\n<h3>Are companies hiring more or fewer people because of AI?<\/h3>\n\n<p>Both, in similar numbers. In the New York Fed&#8217;s August 2026 regional surveys, 15% of service firms said they hired fewer workers than they otherwise would have because of AI, while 13% said they hired more workers to help them use AI. Reduced hiring is a form of displacement that never appears in layoff figures, because the role is simply never created, and it tends to affect entry-level workers most.<\/p>\n\n<h3>Which workers are most worried about AI taking their jobs?<\/h3>\n\n<p>Younger workers and workers without a college degree, according to Gallup&#8217;s August 2026 survey of US workers. Thirty-four percent of workers aged 18 to 44 said they worry technology could make their job obsolete, compared with 19% of workers aged 45 and over. By education, 29% of workers without a college degree carried that worry, against 25% of college graduates.<\/p>\n\n<h2>What Do You Think?<\/h2>\n\n<p>If a company can either retrain the people it has or hire new people who already know the tools, which one should it do &#8211; and does your answer change depending on whether you are the one being retrained? Tell us where you land in the comments.<\/p>\n\n<div class=\"convertkit-form wp-block-convertkit-form\" style=\"\"><script async data-uid=\"6491fb8269\" src=\"https:\/\/bgodinspired.kit.com\/6491fb8269\/index.js\" data-jetpack-boost=\"ignore\" data-no-defer=\"1\" data-no-optimize=\"1\" nowprocket><\/script><\/div>\n\n\n<h2>If You Want to Pass This On<\/h2>\n\n<p>Steal any of these:<\/p>\n\n<blockquote><p>More US workers now fear being made unnecessary (27%) than fear being laid off (24%). Those aren&#8217;t the same fear. One is a business decision. The other feels like a verdict. Found this on bgodinspired.com and haven&#8217;t stopped thinking about it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n<blockquote><p>Everyone said AI would replace workers. The New York Fed actually asked employers what they did in 2026: 4% of service firms laid anyone off. Just over a third retrained people instead. That ratio is not the story anyone is telling. (via bgodinspired.com)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n<blockquote><p>The AI number nobody quotes: 15% of firms hired fewer people because of it, and 13% hired more people because of it. Almost a wash. The quiet loss isn&#8217;t the layoff &#8211; it&#8217;s the job that never gets posted, and that one lands on whoever is trying to get in. 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A New York Fed survey asked employers what they actually did with AI in 2026, and retraining ran far ahead of layoffs &#8211; with a catch.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":116236,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_wp_convertkit_post_meta":{"form":"-1","landing_page":"0","tag":"0","restrict_content":"0"},"footnotes":""},"categories":[5222,5223],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-116237","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bgodinspired-business-news","category-bgodinspired-technology-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116237","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=116237"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116237\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":116238,"href":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116237\/revisions\/116238"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/116236"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=116237"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=116237"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=116237"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}