🚨 The recent commentary by RAND (October 24, 2025) , originally published by Barron’s on October 18, and authored by Jonathan Welburn and Vegard Mokleiv Nygaard, invites us to radically reconsider the way we interpret the relationship between artificial intelligence and work.
The title is provocative: “AI is making jobs, not taking them”, but the content goes beyond optimism: it offers a data-driven, more cautious and realistic perspective on what is actually happening.
The starting point is clear: AI is not (yet) revolutionizing employment the way Wall Street and the media suggest and the real issue lies in how slowly AI is being adopted in real business processes.
🔍 Some interesting data:
* Only 2 % of companies in the logistics and transportation sector use generative AI.
* In the financial and insurance sectors, the rate is around 10 %.
* Even in the IT world, only 1 in 4 companies truly integrates generative AI into its products or services.
But the most surprising data point is this: companies that use AI are more likely to increase employment than reduce it.
Why?
Because we’re confusing “exposure to AI” with “full automation.” Most AI technologies today are augmenting and redefining work, not replacing it.
💡 Another study cited in the piece (MIT Sloan Executive Education) shows that 95 % of companies are not getting returns from their AI investments because they still fail to integrate these tools into their core processes.
The problem isn’t technological power, but alignment between tools, people and organizational structure.
📎 At least three reflections emerge for those working in governance and labor markets:
1. Talking about AI without considering real adoption data creates false expectations and unnecessary polarization.
2. Regulating the future of work can’t be based on rigid categories (“human” vs “artificial” labor), but on hybrid ecosystems.
3. This is the time to invest in training and adaptive capacity, not in apocalyptic predictions.
📣 The real issue isn’t “AI vs work,” but rather AI as a catalyst for new types of work and new skills.
👉 Read the full RAND commentary:
https://lnkd.in/dVzV2bCb
#AIGovernance #JobCreation #AIAdoption #Ethics # #AIWorkforce #DigitalTransformation
Brian Kuramoto Khang Nguyen Randy Franks Denise Carter