THE ARCHIVE
Every number we publish, with the body that produced it and the date it was true. The tier on each card says how strong the receipt is — straight from the source, reported second-hand, or a named analyst's estimate. Nothing here is unsourced. How we source these.
The information sector — telecom, media, tech services — led US corporate AI hiring in 2025. Lightcast data cited in Stanford's 2026 AI Index found AI skills required in 13.2% of the sector's job postings, up from 7.8% in 2024
Open this fact →BLS's 2024-34 employment projections show AI adoption fueling outsized growth in the occupations that build and secure it: data scientist jobs are projected to grow 33.5%, more than ten times the 3.1% projected growth rate for all US occupations combined 33.5% projected growth in US data scientist jobs through 2034
Open this fact →Nearly 750 executives in the Duke/Federal Reserve CFO Survey expect AI to barely touch total headcount — aggregate employment down less than 0.4% in 2026. What shifts is the mix, over the next three years: routine clerical work down more than 2 percentage points of employment share
Open this fact →Epoch AI asked LLM judges how long an experienced engineer would need, without AI, to reproduce each merged pull request from the 41 collaborators on OpenAI's public Codex repository. In the second quarter of 2026, work beyond what anyone could finish in a single unassisted day accounted for 8% of contributor-days, up from 2% a year earlier
Open this fact →NBER asked 69 economists what the US economy would look like in 2050 if AI capabilities advance rapidly. Their median answer was 3.5% annual GDP growth, alongside a labour force participation rate falling from today's 62% to 55.0% by 2050, the level before women entered the workforce en masse
Open this fact →Epoch AI and Ipsos asked 469 US workers who had used AI for work in the previous seven days whose subscription they were on. In computer, engineering and science jobs 67% use a tool their employer provides — everywhere else the free tier wins: 46% of US workers using AI at work are on a free plan, against 37% given a tool by their employer
Open this fact →Asked what three years of AI had actually changed inside their own firms, nearly 6,000 senior executives across the US, UK, Germany and Australia mostly reported nothing: nine in ten saw no impact on employment or productivity
Open this fact →In a randomised field experiment across 66 firms and 7,137 knowledge workers, a generative AI tool built into everyday work apps saved the people who used it two hours a week on email, with no detected change in their tasks
Open this fact →Mentions of generative AI skills in US AI job postings grew 111% from 2024 to 2025, even as their share of total AI postings slipped, as employer demand pivots toward agentic-AI skills, per Lightcast data cited in Stanford's AI Index 111%
Open this fact →Across 5,179 customer-support agents, a generative AI assistant raised issues resolved per hour by 14% on average — and by 34% for the least experienced staff
Open this fact →A McKinsey survey of employers cited in Stanford's 2026 AI Index found anticipated AI-driven workforce cuts concentrated in service operations, supply chain and software engineering, while almost half of organizations expect little or no change overall. Still, one-third of employers expect AI to shrink their workforce in the year ahead
Open this fact →In a randomised trial, 16 experienced open-source developers believed AI tools had made them 20% faster. Measured against issues they finished without AI, they were 19% slower
Open this fact →A randomised online experiment gave 1,174 adults aged 25 to 45 an incentivised business problem-solving task, some with a generative-AI assistant and some without. Unaided, the higher-education group beat the lower-education group by 0.548 standard deviations. With AI the gap fell to 0.139 — about three-quarters of the education gap closed
Open this fact →Menaka Hampole and co-authors linked resume data to firms' AI-application adoption to isolate AI's true effect on jobs, not just correlation. In their preferred instrumental-variables specification, a one-standard-deviation rise in an occupation's AI exposure cuts its within-firm employment share by 14%
Open this fact →Stanford's AI Index, citing Brynjolfsson et al., finds AI's labour-market effect landing on hiring pipelines rather than on broad job losses. By September 2025, employment for US software developers aged 22 to 25 had fallen close to 20% from its 2022 peak
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