Stanford dashboards show young workers' employment in AI-exposed jobs falling 4.4% a year

The Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI's Digital Economy Lab has published its latest findings from the AI Economic Indicators, monthly dashboards it launched in June 2026 to track AI's economic effects in real time. Employment for 22- to 25-year-olds in software development and customer service, the two most AI-exposed sectors, has fallen by more than 3% a year since ChatGPT's release, with the annual decline sharpening to 4.4% in recent months.

The Canaries Dashboard, built with ADP Research using anonymized payroll data, compares employment across occupations with high and low AI exposure. It also shows slower job growth for young women than for young men, though researcher Bharat Chandar cautioned that the data may not be representative enough to confirm a broader pattern.

The data also shows slower or contracting employment growth in occupations where workers use AI mainly for automation. Stanford based that analysis partly on Anthropic's Economic Index, which examines about one million anonymized Claude conversations.

Two other dashboards track broader economic indicators and generative AI adoption. The Transformation Tracker has shown little change across its 12 indicators, while the Adoption Monitor uses surveys to measure AI use among individuals and companies.