So they studied change in "headcount" (full-time, part-time?), but what are these heads doing? A more interesting metric to study would be changes in wages for a normalized position (e.g. 40h/week, 4w PTO/y). Then you could disentangle the different effects of actually hiring a highly paid worker or replacing a highly paid worker with two new assistants + an AI subscription for less total compensation. AI is just the latest stage of a long trend in automation. If you check the first chart in the recent article of the NY FED [1] you'll see that the labor share has been on a decline for decades, and the trend hints at an accelerating decline. In light of this larger trend, I wouldn't expect that the wages of the "increased headcount" according to ramp's article is growing or holding ground.

[1]: https://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2026/06/the-po...

Seems like a questionable correlation. The companies with money to burn on AI are those those that are growing and doing well so ofc their growing headcount too

What is the value of saying this when ChatGPT was released in 2022? There’s no way there’s enough data to make any meaningful extrapolation about anything.

Skeptical of the study approach, but it is an entirely possible scenario if we don’t hit AGI. Many of the non-tech companies are only now starting to invest into AI. For many of them, AI might unlock new business approaches. Eg a company switches to real time pricing. Great, but suddenly you need people swapping price tags. Or you launch a project to replace paper price tags with electronic tags. Those need to be regularly maintained and charged, etc. Oops, our legacy ERP system can’t deal with that. Let’s upgrade that

Because people are wasting time and tokens doing irrelevant to the bottom line things.

Cool you spent 2 days and $200 building a react UI for your spreadsheet.

We can’t really say what this means. Maybe heavy AI use caused companies to perform better and grow. Or maybe the type of company that went big into AI was the type of company that was getting investments and growing because of it?

That's interesting and goes directly against what everyone complains about in the employment sector.

I'm sure there is a big caveat in there somewhere.

>AI adoption and the associated gains are unevenly distributed.

"Oh yeah, we had to hire a bunch of guys to clean up the slop"

Too soon.

is that more or less than regular headcount growth?

So, more skynet leads to more real jobs?

I am confused. Wasn't the initial claim that AI kills all jobs?

I feel the claim right now is not really correct. One needs to do a thorough analysis of the whole job market across different countries, say, over 5 years. Or at the least 3 years but very complete and unbiased either way.

These studies miss a huge point, which is: working with automation outside of programming is tedious, frustrating, and soul crushing. I see it already with some non technical clients. I have notice a terrible trend of people just offloading everything to agents or prompting even the simplest interaction with other humans. Let me tell you, it’s fucking dire.

The human teams that were there doing CMS translations, or doing image assets, are no more...

I'm not entirely sure that's the claim or conclusion. Like they said the companies increasing headcount are also being pumped full of $$$. That's a non-permanent state of affairs because it's heavily fueled by speculation about possible future scenarios which may or may not come to pass.

I think the bigger conclusion is that LLMs are, for now, having a minimal effect on the labor market. And I think this makes sense. In spite of individual claims of 10x productivity boost or whatever, their effect on the bottom line of companies seems to remain quite unclear, at best. On the contrary the token-maxing catastrophe seems to have resulted in companies becoming far more price conscious towards LLM usage.

That’s not supported by the evidence. Current rates of employment are well below historic levels.

In preindustrial societies nearly everyone was working to support themselves and their families, these days a huge percentage of the population is in education, retirement, prison, disability, etc.

The only way jobs have kept up with automation is when you ignore population growth, but more people naturally increases the required workforce. You inherently need more police, food, etc when you have more people.

there never has been a nuclear war, so why do some people worry about it, I dont understand, probably they have some axes to grind

> The counter claim that LLMs were special for some reason has never been supported. And a lot of its proponents have other axes to grind, like UBI, Socialism, Communism etc.

No, they are mostly right wing capitalists. LLM is not a left wing project. UBI is something they talked about, but super hard to believe it is anything but a way to shut up critics.

> The claim is and always has been that automation increases net jobs.

That was definitely not the common claim last 4 years.

> There's never been an automation revolution that worked otherwise.

That is not what historical record shows. In the short term, larger unemployment are to be expected. Over long term, it evens out.