Job Market Disruption

Extracted Attributes

• Key Driver

  AI Transformation

• Key Metric

  Occupational Churn (Index of employment disruption measuring absolute value of difference in employment shares)

• Core Human Skills

  Creativity, Leadership, and Resilience

• Proposed Solution

  Lifelong Learning

• Associated Concept

  Disruptive Innovation (popularized by Clayton Christensen in 1995)

• Future Technologies

  Physical AI (Self-driving, Humanoid Robotics)

• Workforce Goal (McKinsey)

  One-to-one ratio of AI agents to human employees

Timeline

• Clayton Christensen and collaborators popularize the term 'disruptive innovation' in business theory. (Source: Wikipedia)

  1995-01-01

• Launch of ChatGPT, initiating an unprecedented pace of innovation in AI. (Source: CES 2026 Panel)

  2022-11-30

• NBER publishes research exploring past episodes of technological disruption in the US labor market to predict AI's impact. (Source: NBER Working Paper 33323)

  2025-01-01

• CES 2026 panel declares AI transformation will dwarf prior tech revolutions; Bill Gates suggests using 2026 to prepare for job disruption policies. (Source: CES 2026 Panel / Yahoo Finance)

  2026-01-01

• Predicted dominance of self-driving technology (Physical AI) led by companies like Waymo. (Source: CES 2026 Panel)

  2026-12-31

• Predicted emergence of humanoid robotics as a major factor in the workforce. (Source: CES 2026 Panel)

  2027-12-31

Disruptive innovation

In business theory, disruptive innovation is innovation that creates a new market and value network or enters at the bottom of an existing market and eventually displaces established market-leading firms, products, and alliances. In theory, disruptive innovation makes it hard for leading firms to stay at the top of their industry. The term, "disruptive innovation" was popularized by the American academic Clayton Christensen and his collaborators beginning in 1995. Not all innovations are disruptive, even if they are revolutionary. For example, the first automobiles in the late 19th century were not a disruptive innovation, because early automobiles were expensive luxury items that did not disrupt the market for horse-drawn vehicles. However, the mass-produced automobile was a disruptive innovation, because it changed the transportation market, whereas the first thirty years of automobiles did not. Disruptive innovations tend to be produced by outsiders and entrepreneurs in startups, rather than existing market-leading companies. The business environment of market leaders does not allow them to pursue disruptive innovations when they first arise, because they are not profitable enough at first and because their development can take scarce resources away from sustaining innovations (which are needed to compete against current competition). Small teams are more likely to create disruptive innovations than large teams. A disruptive process can take longer to develop than by the conventional approach and the risk associated with it is higher than the other more incremental, architectural or evolutionary forms of innovations, but once it is deployed in the market, it achieves a much faster penetration and higher degree of impact on the established markets.

Web Search Results

• Technological Disruption in the Labor Market

  This paper explores past episodes of technological disruption in the US labor market, with the goal of learning lessons about the likely future impact of artificial intelligence (AI). We measure changes in the structure of the US labor market going back over a century. We find, perhaps surprisingly, that the pace of change has slowed over time. The years spanning 1990 to 2017 were less disruptive than any prior period we measure, going back to 1880. This comparative decline is not because the job market is stable today but rather because past changes were so profound. General-purpose technologies (GPTs) like steam power and electricity dramatically disrupted the twentieth-century labor market, but the changes took place over decades. We argue that AI could be a GPT on the scale of prior [...] because of technological improvements in online retail. The post-pandemic labor market is changing very rapidly, and a key question is whether this faster pace of change will persist into the future. [...] David J. Deming, Christopher Ong, and Lawrence H. Summers, "Technological Disruption in the Labor Market," NBER Working Paper 33323 (2025), Download Citation + data appendix ## Related ### Topics Macroeconomics Consumption and Investment Labor Economics Labor Supply and Demand ### Programs Economic Fluctuations and Growth Labor Studies Productivity, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship ## Mentioned in the News Is AI already shaking up the labor market? Four trends point to major change - MSN Source: MSN Read the research here. ## More from the NBER

• Technological Disruption in the US Labor Market

  Taken together, these four facts suggest that we may be entering a period of more pronounced labor market disruption. To illustrate this point, we recalculate our measure of labor market “churn” through 2022. Although the 2010s were very stable pre-pandemic, the post-pandemic labor market has changed dramatically. A key outstanding question is whether the labor market disruption of the past few years is a temporary response to the changes wrought by COVID-19 or an early sign of AI-fueled labor market disruption. 1. Data and measurement of technological change We measure technological disruption in the US labor market by studying changes in the skill and task content of work over more than a century. Which types of jobs have grown, and which are disappearing? Technology substitutes for [...] We measure the pace of labor market change more systematically by computing an index of employment disruption that we call “churn.” We define churn for each occupation group as the absolute value of the difference in employment shares over a decade. For example, sales occupations declined from 10.8 percent to 9.1 percent of employment between 2012 and 2022, while business occupations increased from 4.4 to 5.8 percent. By our metric, the churns in sales and business were 1.7 and 1.4 percentage points respectively. We then sum these values up across all occupation categories to get a comprehensive measure of labor market disruption. While there is no perfect way of capturing labor market change, our churn measure has three advantages relative to other alternatives. First, it is a [...] Technological Disruption in the US Labor Market 175 Figure 1: Changes in the occupation structure of the US labor market, 1880–2024 Notes: Calculations are based on decadal US census data from 1880 to 2000 (except for 1890) and 2001-2022 American Community Survey (ACS) samples (except for 2020), sourced via the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) (Ruggles et al. 2024). Occupations are harmonized across decades to two-digit SOC codes using the IPUMS occ1950 encoding and methodology used in Autor and Dorn 2013; a detailed methodology is described in the data appendix. Samples are restricted to workers aged 18 to 64 in noninstitutional quarters who provide nonmilitary occupational responses. See the appendix for exhaustive definitions of each category.

• How Will AI Affect the Global Workforce?

  “Until the AI adoption cycle has fully played out, the potential labor market disruption—including which jobs are likely to be displaced by generative AI—will remain an open question,” Briggs and Dong write.

• Evaluating the Impact of AI on the Labor Market: Current State ...

  Overall, our metrics indicate that the broader labor market has not experienced a discernible disruption since ChatGPT’s release 33 months ago, undercutting fears that AI automation is currently eroding the demand for cognitive labor across the economy.1 [...] Our analysis complements other recent studies that provide nascent evidence of possible AI impacts on specific occupations and sub-populations, such as early career workers. We took a broader lens, widening the aperture to the whole labor market, and asked two main questions. First, is the pace of labor market change in this 33-month period of employment disruption different from past periods of early technological change? Second, is there evidence of economy-wide employment effects? To answer these questions, we compare how quickly the occupational mix has changed across a range of measures since ChatGPT’s launch, and compare this to past disruptions from computers and the internet.

• Bill Gates Says 'AI Will Change Society the Most'—Job Disruption ...

  ### [...] The idea that society might eventually shorten the work week to absorb labor disruption—without collapsing into mass unemployment—isn't new. But Gates presenting it as a real possibility in the near term signals a growing sense that traditional labor markets won't keep up with AI's pace of change. Trending: Invest in a Gaming Marketplace Backed by Early Zynga and PayPal Investors— From $300. "Even if the transition takes longer than I expect," he wrote, "we should use 2026 to prepare ourselves for these changes—including which policies will best help spread the wealth and deal with the important role jobs play in our society." [...] ### New on Yahoo