The early success of Meta’s (META) Muse AI agent sheds light on the labor market displacement coming for many workers.
After all, if Muse can speedily perform tasks inside a company, why bother with humans?
“I do think that it’s a waiting game for this [impact of AI] to eventually begin to show up,” Apollo Global Management chief economist Torsten Sløk said on Yahoo Finance’s Sozzi Unleashed (video above). (Disclosure: Yahoo is a portfolio company of funds managed by affiliates of Apollo Global Management.)
“On the one hand, yes, products such as Muse will indeed be saving maybe some jobs, but on the other hand, new products that are coming to the market because of AI will absolutely also be creating more employment,” Sløk said. “So that’s why it becomes not only a labor displacement story, but also what AI will do to business dynamics and ultimately therefore to aggregate employment.”
This has been the year where AI-driven job displacement has ratcheted higher, especially at some very prominent companies.
Billionaire Jack Dorsey’s Block (XYZ) slashed 40% of its staff this year. Layoffs have also swept across Amazon (AMZN), Dell (DELL), Oracle (ORCL), Coinbase (COIN), Cloudflare (NET), and Meta (META). (Disclosure: Yahoo Finance has a partnership with Coinbase.)
More recently, Uber said it would lay off 10% of its workforce to achieve significant efficiencies.
But to Sløk’s point, not everything has been doom and gloom on jobs because of AI.
Through August, the US economy has added roughly 640,000 net nonfarm payroll jobs, averaging roughly 80,000 new jobs per month.
Meanwhile, a new Gartner survey projected that by 2029, 30% of employees laid off due to AI will need to be rehired — at a significantly higher cost than their original positions carried.
“The question still is whether, in the practical world, is this [AI like Muse] mainly going to be used by consumers or will it also be used by corporates?” Sløk said. “How much will corporates in your world unleash this product on everything that they’re doing?”
Brian Sozzi is Yahoo Finance’s Executive Editor, host of the Power Players with Brian Sozzi podcast, and a member of Yahoo Finance’s editorial leadership team. Follow Sozzi on X @BrianSozzi, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Tips on stories? Email brian.sozzi@yahoofinance.com.
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