AI Is Coming for Your Job! Maybe

We have heard all about it. Generative AI (GenAI) tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and the like have become so powerful that they can take over some of tasks that firms now employ people to do. They are a new kind of industrial revolution, except this time it is not craftspeople being replaced by machines, it is office workers being replaced by computing cycles. Unemployment will skyrocket and some occupations will be decimated or worse.

How true is this? This was the question Matteo Devigili, Erdem DogukanYilmaz, Vibha Gaba, and I investigated using data on hiring by major US firms and reported in a Management Science research paper. To answer the question accurately, we thought it was necessary to not just count jobs, but also look at the content of the jobs. Or rather, the skills that each job requires. This can be done by analyzing the text of the job postings firms use when they hire, which can be done automatically by using AI text analysis (yes, we appreciate the irony).

What were we looking for? Because we work for a business school, we care about the blend of activities that managers have and the skills they apply. These can be divided into broad categories: (1) organizing by creating and supervising the structure of the firm, (2) information processing by moving information to where it is needed, and (3) negotiating by handling conflicts and allocating rewards. Of these skills, the last is obviously the one requiring the greatest human touch, so it should be relatively human-centered. The first two might not be, or at least so we thought. What did the evidence say?

We were nearly right, and in ways that should worry managers. There is now lower demand for jobs doing managerial work involving information processing such as coordination and communication. Similarly, jobs engaged in monitoring employee productivity and rewarding high performers are now less needed. The managerial work that has seen no change is structuring the firm through staffing positions and mapping their interrelation, designing incentive systems, and handling conflicts within the firm.

This adds up to a significant reduction in firm hiring of managers. It also means a shift from the more mechanical parts of management to the more human parts: there will be proportionally fewer number crunchers and communicators and more leaders. How consequential will this be for the job market? Truth is, we don’t yet know. We found that firm adjustments of their hiring were so immediate that they made all these changes based on how they thought that AI would benefit the firm. If they are wrong about the AI benefits, they will adjust back. If they are right, then a new management job market has been created.

Devigili, Matteo, Erdem Dogukan Yilmaz, Vibha Gaba, and Henrich R. Greve. 2026. Skill Deprioritization: Reorganizing in the Age of Generative AI. Management Science, forthcoming.