AI's Impact on the Job Market: Skilled Trades Poised for Growth Amid Tech Transformation

Job losses might be likely due to AI but Nvidia's CEO says the booming billion-dollar industry will always need more plumbers and electricians

The explosion of generative AI over the last few years signals a change in the job market alongside it, and this brings with it worries of job instability and losses. With big players like Nvidia, Meta, X, and the governments worldwide further committing to AI, questions are posed to those at the very top. In a recent interview with the British news channel, Channel 4, Nvidia's CEO Jensun Huang, gave his thoughts on what's next. He says, "If you're an electrician, if you're a plumber, if you're a carpenter, we're going to need hundreds of thousands of them. To build all of these factories." Huang argues, "The skilled craft segment of every economy is going to boom". "You're going to have to build. You're going to keep doubling and doubling... every single year." Just last week, Nvidia shared plans to spend $100 billion on OpenAI. This cash is intended to go towards greater supplies of data centre chips, to further train upcoming AI models. Just weeks before that, Nvidia's earnings report showed it made almost 10 times more from AI than gaming. Nvidia's stock price is also at an all-time high, over 10 times what it was half a decade ago. OpenAI's spending has also skyrocketed, alongside ChatGPT's popularity, and the US government is firmly behind cementing "US dominance in artificial intelligence". From a PC gaming perspective, we've even seen brands like Razer jump on the AI bandwagon. This is all to say AI doesn't appear to be going away, and it has backing in the hundreds of billions. When asked what could happen if the UK doesn't 'grasp this opportunity', Huang says, "just as the last industrial revolution, the reason why it came about was because you needed it. And so the industrial revolution that started here in the UK came out of need. You need it now, too." Earlier this year, the UK's Department for Science, Innovation and Technology signed an agreement with OpenAI to push the chatbot into the public sector in a further bid to make the UK an AI powerhouse. Though highlighting future employment seems relevant to current fears around the job market, this doesn't address those who have degrees and experience in fields being replaced. Senator Bernie Sanders argued in June that "Artificial intelligence is going to displace millions and millions of workers". A month after this, OpenAI's Sam Altman shared that he thinks some jobs will be "totally, totally gone" due to AI. A former Google executive in August argued AI will lead to a "short-term dystopia" because it will struggle to create new jobs for those it is replacing. Huang tells reporters, "You're going to be building out AI infrastructure here in the UK for a decade," but it's not clear what the plan is for workers after that.

CEOs and Founders Warn That AI Could Bring Widespread Job Loss and Downsizing

Some executives, including Ford CEO Jim Farley and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, believe the shift could revive interest in trade schools. CEOs and founders across industries, from technology to automotives, say artificial intelligence (AI) could dramatically change how people work. Some believe AI may soon replace many office jobs, while others think it will simply help workers do their jobs better. As investors put billions of dollars into AI and AI-related stocks, many leaders expect big productivity gains. Some are already planning to hire fewer people, betting that AI will reshape the workplace. In June, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy informed employees that generative AI could potentially reduce the company's workforce as business needs evolve. Generative AI creates human-like content -- such as text, images, or jokes -- based on the data it's trained on. Traditional AI, by contrast, follows set rules to complete specific, often complex tasks. "We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs. It's hard to know exactly where this nets out over time, but in the next few years, we expect that this will reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains from using AI extensively across the company," Jassy wrote. Executives at Walmart also anticipate a changing workforce. The company plans to maintain the size of its workforce at a stable level for the next three years while it assesses which roles may be eliminated or created due to the impact of AI. "It's very clear that AI is going to change literally every job. . . Maybe there's a job in the world that AI won't change, but I haven't thought of it," said Doug McMillon, CEO of Walmart. But some CEOs have issued more dire warnings for workers more broadly. Dario Amodei, co-founder and CEO of Anthropic -- the AI company that created the chatbot Claude -- recommends that younger white-collar workers, in particular, buckle up for a dramatic change in the coming years. "AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs -- and spike unemployment to [10% to] 20% in the next one to five years," Amodei told Axios in May. "Most of them are unaware that this is about to happen." Ford CEO Jim Farley says renewed interest in trade schools may be needed if AI leads to major white-collar job losses -- a sentiment recently echoed by Jensen Huang, Nvidia CEO, too. "I think we need to go back to the basics -- to trade schools. And we need to have a society that doesn't look down on people like that," Farley said in an interview with journalist Walter Isaacson at the Aspen Ideas Festival in July. Some CEOs believe AI will support -- not replace -- human workers, enabling them to perform their jobs more efficiently. "I keep looking around, talking to CEOs, asking: What AI are they using for these big layoffs? I think AI augments people, but I don't know if it necessarily replaces them," said Marc Benioff, CEO and cofounder of Salesforce, in a Fortune interview in July. He added, "Maybe there's a future AI model that will be more accurate, but that's not where we are right now." In fact, a recent Yale Budget Lab analysis found that this was the case -- at least for now. The researchers found that AI has yet to have a negative impact on the labor market. They acknowledged that it typically takes many decades for a new technology to have a significant impact. "Overall, our metrics indicate that the broader labor market has not experienced a discernible disruption since ChatGPT's release 33 months ago, undercutting fears that AI automation is currently eroding the demand for cognitive labor across the economy," the researchers wrote. They added, "Historically, widespread technological disruption in workplaces tends to occur over decades, rather than months or years." One founder, however, believes that, in the long run, jobs in at least one industry will be safe from AI: his own. "It is possible -- I don't want to be definitive -- but like it is possible that [venture capitalism] is quite literally timeless," said Marc Andreessen -- cofounder and general partner of the Venture Capital firm Andreessen Horowitz -- on the a16z podcast in April. "And when the AIs are doing everything else, that may be one of the last remaining fields that people are still doing."

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang Says This Job Will Win The Al Race, But It's Not a Job in Tech

Yale Budget Lab data shows no significant artificial intelligence-driven labor market disruption 33 months after ChatGPT's launch. Workers are increasingly worried that an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven cost-cutting wave could threaten their jobs. And Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang isn't offering much comfort. In a recent interview with Channel 4 News in the U.K., he said the real winners of the AI era won't be office workers, but electricians, plumbers, and carpenters. "The skilled craft segment of every economy is going to see a boom," Huang told the outlet, arguing that the build-out of AI data centers will require constant expansion, "doubling and doubling and doubling every single year." His view is gaining traction among other executives, despite recent data from the Yale Budget Lab indicating that AI has yet to significantly disrupt the job market. But if Huang is correct, the next decade could reshape which skills command premium pay. Rather than software engineers and programmers being the clear winners, Huang -- whose company just committed $100 billion to OpenAI's data center buildout -- argues the real opportunity lies in building the physical infrastructure behind AI. His prediction echoes concerns from other corporate leaders who see a gap between the industry's ambitious data center buildout and the workforce available to make it happen. For example, BlackRock, Inc. (BLK) CEO Larry Fink raised the issue directly with the White House earlier this year, warning that the combination of restrictive immigration policies and declining interest among young Americans in trades could create a critical labor shortage. "I've even told members of the Trump team that we're going to run out of electricians that we need to build out AI data centers," Fink said at an energy conference in March. "We just don't have enough." A single 250,000-square-foot data center can employ up to 1,500 construction workers during buildout -- many earning more than $100,000 plus overtime, all without requiring a college degree. Once operational, each data center supports about 50 full-time maintenance positions, with each of those jobs generating an additional 3.5 positions in the surrounding economy, according to a recent McKinsey analysis. With global capital spending on data centers projected to hit $7 trillion by 2030, there could be a significant shift in the kind of labor the tech sector needs going forward. New research released on Wednesday from Yale's Budget Lab finds little evidence yet of significant labor market disruption, almost three years after the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022. But job changes are happening slightly faster than during previous technology shifts like the rise of the personal computer and the internet. Still, the shift has thus far been modest, with the trends starting before ChatGPT arrived, "undercutting fears that AI automation is currently eroding the demand for cognitive labor across the economy," the report notes. The researchers examined multiple angles: overall employment patterns, job changes in , and unemployment rates among workers in high-risk fields. None showed clear signs of AI-driven job losses. Even in sectors with the highest AI exposure, like information, financial, and professional services, the occupational changes appear to have begun in 2021, well before became widely available. The data on shows some possible early effects, with slight increases in how differently their job mix looks compared with older graduates. But the Budget Lab cautions this could reflect a slowing labor market hitting younger workers harder, as it typically does. Still, students figuring out their future or workers thinking ahead to shifts in the economy may want to consider the warnings of Huang and others. "While this finding may contradict the most alarming headlines, it is not surprising given past precedents," the Budget Lab analysis said. "It is reasonable to expect that widespread effects will take longer than 33 months [since ChatGPT's launch] to materialize." AI isn't wiping out white-collar jobs yet -- but building and maintaining its infrastructure may offer better long-term job security. As CEOs warn of skilled trade shortages, the may not be behind a keyboard, but on a data center construction site.