For years, warnings about AI have focused on job loss, reduced hiring and the possibility that entire occupations could disappear. The headlines are filled with questions like: Will entire roles vanish? Which occupations are most exposed? But early research suggests AI’s impact on wages could appear before it shows up in unemployment figures.

Research from Apollo Global Management showed that real wage growth in occupations with high observed AI use lagged less-exposed occupations by 6.7 percentage points after 2023. Yet the researchers found no statistically significant decline in employment over the same period. They described the first measurable labor-market effect of AI as “wage compression rather than employment displacement.”

A job can survive even as employers need less human expertise to complete parts of it. That can mean smaller pay raises, weaker bargaining power and slower earnings growth. It also raises a new question: Why is AI increasing the value of some roles while putting more pressure on the pay attached to others?

AI’s Impact On Wages Is Already Uneven

Apollo measured observed use of Anthropic’s Claude across 321 U.S. occupations. Researchers identified 11 highly exposed occupations representing 5.8 million people, or 3.7% of the U.S. labor force. The five most exposed in Apollo’s sample were computer programmers, customer service representatives, data entry keyers, medical records specialists and the combined category of market research analysts and marketing specialists.

The wage effect varied across both pay levels and occupation types:

Lowest-paid quartile: 10.7 percentage points slower wage growth

Highest-paid quartile: no statistically significant effect

Sales and office occupations: 7.3 points slower

Management and professional occupations: 4.1 points slower

The study........

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