Blake Lawit, the Chief Global Affairs and Legal Officer for LinkedIn, the professional networking platform owned by Microsoft, confirmed in an interview at Semafor’s World Economy summit this week that the company’s extensive data indicates a hiring downturn of approximately 20% since 2022.
However, Lawit was quick to challenge the prevailing notion that artificial intelligence is primarily responsible for this reduction in job placements.
“At LinkedIn… we have an economic graph which is over a billion members. We’ve got companies, jobs, skills. It’s really an amazing real-time view of what’s happening in the labor market. And we’ve looked — because everyone wants to know the answer to this question: Is AI impacting jobs right now? We’ve looked and, honestly, we haven’t seen it,” he stated during the discussion, emphasizing the platform's unique vantage point into labor market dynamics.
Instead, the executive proposed that the observed deceleration in hiring is more directly attributable to the ascent of interest rates. Lawit further elaborated, “We have not seen the sort of impacts that you would expect to see in areas that everyone is talking about AI… like industries, whether or not it’s customer support, or administrative, or marketing — all these places that if we were seeing impacts [from] AI that’s where it would be.”
He underscored the overall trend, noting, “Yes, hiring’s down, but not down more,” and added that LinkedIn’s data also doesn’t suggest a disproportionate decline in first-time job acquisition among college-aged young adults compared to those in mid or later career stages.
Despite these observations, Lawit acknowledged that the future landscape could shift. “Doesn’t mean it’s not going to happen in the future, but not yet,” he cautioned.
On this point, Lawit issued a significant warning: while the skills required for the average job have evolved by 25% over the past several years, LinkedIn projects that this figure will surge to 70% by 2030, driven by the rapid advancement of AI. He concluded with a poignant observation: “So, even if you’re not changing jobs, your job’s changing on you.”
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