Fed Chair says AI is "not showing up in layoffs yet"

Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell noted that while AI is "part of the story" behind labor-market weakness, it's "not a big part of the story, yet."

Transcript

00:00It's probably part of the story. It's not a big part of the story yet.

00:04We don't know whether it will be. But for example, if you look at, you can't miss the big

00:09announcements of layoffs and also companies saying that they're not going to hire anybody

00:14for a long time. And they cite AI. That's all clearly happening. At the same time,

00:19people are not filing for unemployment insurance. And since job creation, job finding rates are

00:26extremely low. If there were big numbers of layoffs, you'd expect the continuing claims

00:33to go up and you'd expect new claims to go up. They really haven't much. So it's a little bit

00:38curious. But longer term, though, the question is, what are we going to see here? And we don't know.

00:43But it may be that in past technology, really significant technology innovation eras,

00:53you have seen some jobs destroyed and other jobs made. Ultimately, what's happened for a couple

00:58hundred years is when you get through all that, you have higher productivity and you have you have

01:04new jobs and there are enough jobs for people. This may be different. Every time we have a wave

01:08of technology, we think, oh, this could this could put a lot of people out of work. What are they going

01:12to do? In the past, there's always been more work and higher productivity and incomes have risen.

01:17What will happen here? We're going to have to see. But right now is such early days. We don't think

01:22we see much. It's certainly not showing up in layoffs yet.