Several US occupations expected to be impacted by artificial intelligence saw heavy job losses for a second year in 2025, led by customer service representatives and certain types of secretaries and salespeople.
A group of 18 occupations flagged by the Bureau of Labor Statistics as exposed to AI, accounting for about 10 million jobs, saw a 0.2% drop in employment between May 2024 and May 2025, according to annual data published Friday. That compared with an increase in overall employment of 0.8% over the same period.
Excluding the fast-growing category of medical secretaries and assistants, however — a job tied to the ongoing boom in the healthcare sector — employment in the other 17 occupations fell 1.6% for the second year in a row.
The data offer indications that deployment of AI tools across American workplaces may be starting to contribute to a large-scale rearrangement of employment patterns.
In a report published Thursday, Goldman Sachs economists found that “occupations highly exposed to AI substitution have seen openings fall below pre-pandemic levels, while those exposed to AI augmentation or less exposed to AI have seen job openings fall more gradually.”
Employment of customer service representatives fell by 130,180, or 4.8%, in the year through May 2025, according to the BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics release. The number of secretaries and assistants except medical, legal and executive fell by 31,030, or 1.8%, while wholesale and manufacturing sales representatives excluding for technical and scientific products were down 28,670, or 2.3%.
Since May 2022 — the most recent data point prior to the introduction of ChatGPT by OpenAI later that year — the occupations seeing the biggest declines among the 18 are credit authorizers, checkers and clerks (down 26.2%), broadcast announcers and radio disc jockeys (down 20.8%) and sales engineers (down 13.2%).
While the numbers offer early signs of the impact of AI on employment, the BLS cautioned in its November 2024 article singling out the 18 occupations that the list “should not be considered exhaustive or definitive,” but rather comprised by “examples in which a reasonable expectation of an AI-driven impact currently exists.”
Written by: Michael Msika @Bloomberg
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