The World Economic Forum’s latest report produced news of 92 million jobs being eliminated due to AI by 2030. But in that same report was the prediction of an estimated 170 million new jobs, which will create a net gain of 78 million. As leaders who have invested in over 20 unicorns over the last decade and advised hundreds of companies on technological shifts and transformation for decades, we have seen that panic of job loss and skyrocketing unemployment dominate headlines and drive the news cycles, but the whole story always tells a different tale.
Yes, we will see disruption and job displacement — that’s inevitable. We’ve lived through the tech boom of the ’90s, the birth of the internet, cloud computing, and waves of automation over the past 35 years. Has any of this led to the predicted dystopia? Consider this: in 1991, the global unemployment rate was 5.1%. After three decades of technological revolution and exponential AI growth, the global unemployment rate in 2024 was 4.89%. If you believed only the headlines that followed every technological breakthrough of the past 35 years, you’d assume half the world would be unemployed by now.
The truth? Technology always creates more than it destroys.
