A working paper from the Stanford Digital Economy Lab, released on November 13, 2025, found that workers aged 22 to 25 in occupations most exposed to AI experienced a 16% relative decline in employment after the spread of generative AI. More experienced workers in the same roles were largely unaffected, or even saw their employment improve.
What the data actually shows
The paper, authored by Erik Brynjolfsson, Bharat Chandar, and Ruyu Chen, is titled “Canaries in the Coal Mine? Six Facts about the Recent Employment Effects of Artificial Intelligence.”
The team used high-frequency payroll records from ADP, one of the largest payroll processors in the US. The 16% decline was measured after controlling for firm-level employment shocks. In English: even after accounting for companies that were already shrinking for unrelated reasons, early-career workers in AI-exposed roles like software development and customer service still took a disproportionate hit.
Crypto’s own version of the same story
