Employers are not (yet) firing people en masse to hand their jobs to AI. The more visible effect, according to one economist who watches hiring closely, is quieter: companies are simply not hiring — because they want to see what AI can do first.
Joseph Mayans, chief economist at credit-data firm Experian, told the HR Executive Strategy Summit at HR Tech 2026 on 19 October that employers are delaying recruitment while they assess which tasks AI might handle. “Companies are just saying, ‘Let’s try to implement AI. Let’s see what it can do. Let’s not hire this person to come in and try to do this role,’” he said, as reported by HR Executive’s Jill Barth.
He expects weak job creation to persist over the next two years as employers weigh technology investments against economic uncertainty — and he described the present state of the white-collar workforce as a “slow leak.”
The numbers in his argument
Mayans focused on financial services, information, and professional and business services as core white-collar industries. Hiring in those sectors has been largely flat since late 2022, he said, while layoffs have increased gradually. With limited recruitment, he noted, layoffs don’t need to grow much to push unemployment up.
The people waiting longest, in his telling, are at the ladder’s two ends: recent graduates facing particular difficulty, and experienced degree-holders whose job searches stretch out. “You’re going to see longer periods of unemployment from more educated people,” he said, adding that many will need reskilling before they re-enter.
What the same speech said was going right
This is not a doom reading, and Mayans was careful about what he did and didn’t claim. He was cautious about AI’s long-run effect on total employment, and he named industries where conditions are better: manufacturing, construction and mining, with wage growth in construction and mining holding up better than in financial and business services. Data centre construction specifically is a source of strength — the AI boom is also a building trade — though he flagged that dependence as a vulnerability if investment slows.
On the supply side, he attributed tightness in parts of the labour market to retirements and reduced immigration. His overarching forecast was restrained rather than alarming: “We should not expect job creation to improve.”
Situating the caution against this week’s optimism
The Experian view lands one day after AMS/Korn Ferry’s 13-country research found 81 percent of employers plan to increase early-career hiring. The two can be read together without contradiction: employers say they intend to keep hiring juniors, but the same intent surveys show half of them can’t yet describe what the job will be — which is exactly the uncertainty an economist would expect to show up as a hiring pause rather than a hiring wave.
It also rhymes with the evidence from an AI lab that published its own internal numbers last week: junior hires down to under a tenth of new technical roles, with agents doing more of the routine work. Firm-level behaviour is ahead of firm-level intentions, and Mayans’s “anticipatory” employers are the gap between the two.
For New Zealand readers, the exportable part is the shape of it rather than the specifics: a market where the graduate rung thins out not through mass redundancy, but through unfilled vacancies. New Zealand’s own data complicates a direct transfer — SEEK job ads here have been rising, with AI-related listings growing off a low base — and the Reserve Bank has previously mapped how graduate first-rungs work. The Experian pattern is a US read from a summit speaker, not a NZ forecast.
The practical takeaway Mayans offers job seekers is about timing, not despair: in hiring-freeze conditions, searches take longer even for strong candidates, and budgeting for that — or building skills employers are actively listing — matters more than headline unemployment.
FAQ
Why is white-collar hiring slowing if AI isn’t causing mass layoffs? Experian’s chief economist attributes it to anticipation: firms delay filling roles while they assess what AI can absorb, so vacancies close and searches lengthen even without big layoff announcements.
Is the AI slowdown hitting graduates hardest? Mayans said recent graduates face particular difficulty, and longer job searches are showing up among educated workers generally, not only new entrants.
Which sectors are still hiring well? In Mayans’s read: manufacturing, construction and mining — often tied to specific locations — with data centre construction a notable strength while other construction weakens.
— CJ Murden, editor of Singularity.Kiwi. Former digital technologies teacher, author of AI-focused books. Writing with a New Zealand focus.
