Researchers examined employment across 41 countries and traced the shift mainly to growth in senior roles. They found no statistically clear decline in junior employment.
By March 2026, junior workers’ share of employment at AI adopters’ overseas units was 1.9 percentage points lower than at comparable units of non-adopting companies. The authors estimated a 6.7% gain in senior employment relative to those controls, with 2.5% fewer junior jobs, an estimate that was not statistically significant.
Bharat Chandar of Stanford and Bouke Klein Teeselink of King’s College London report the estimates in a September working paper. They drew on a database containing 1.25 billion job advertisements and 154 million employment records, tracking workforce changes from January 2021 through March 2026.
The researchers identified AI adopters through job ads involving generative AI. This gives them a signal of adoption, but no direct measure of how widely employees use the technology. The control group comprised overseas operations in the same country and sector, matched on their initial workforce characteristics.
Focusing on overseas operations also helped them address a harder question: whether AI changed hiring, or whether growing companies were simply more likely to adopt it. They used adoption among other multinationals headquartered near each parent company to help distinguish these effects. The approach depends on those nearby firms influencing the overseas unit’s workforce through the parent’s AI adoption, rather than through other channels.
Of the 41 countries studied, 31 had sufficient evidence for separate estimates. Those pointed in the same direction in 23 countries. Only seven of those declines in the junior share were statistically significant.
Senior employment also shifted toward occupations whose tasks are more exposed to AI. Estimates for juniors pointed away from those occupations, though the evidence was weaker.
The comparison concerns employment within multinational companies. It cannot establish whether AI has increased or reduced employment across the economy: adopters can gain business and staff at competitors’ expense.