Good morning. AI may be dominating boardroom conversations, but a handful of giant employers are driving AI hiring in the U.S.
“I think we’re overestimating the speed at which we’re going to see this transformation,” Svenja Gudell, chief economist at Indeed, said on Tuesday to a room of executives during a panel session at the 2026 Fortune Workplace Innovation Summit in Atlanta about the pace of the labor market’s AI transformation. “I think we’re underestimating the long-term impact it will have.”
Gudell was responding to Fortune‘s Ruth Umoh, who pointed to Indeed’s Hiring Lab analysis of 2025 data. As of late 2025, 5.7% of U.S. firms had posted at least one AI-related job on Indeed, up from roughly 2% in 2018, and about 4% of all job postings mentioned AI at all, according to Indeed’s report released in January. Yet nearly 90% of those AI-related postings came from just 1% of companies, with adoption rates reaching 49.9% among the largest firms compared with only 1.3% among the smallest third. According to Indeed’s May 14 report, over 5% of job postings on the platform now mention AI, as of April 2026.
AI is going to significantly change the way we do things, “not tomorrow or the day after, but months and years into the future,” Gudell said. “I think it’s so important to have the data and to be able to act now to kind of kick off the things that you need to do in order to be set up for tomorrow,” she said, adding that while it’s a difficult task, it’s also really important. Gudell also said that the sectors most exposed to AI, are seeing growth in job demand.
