This Exploding Industry Could Cause Major Disruptions To US Economy, Analysts Warn

America’s ongoing artificial intelligence (AI) boom may be on track to significantly disrupt the job market, according to analysts.

The global AI industry is expected to continue rapidly growing over the next few years, with companies now projected to invest over $500 billion on its technology in 2026 alone. Several analysts told the Daily Caller News Foundation that increasing AI adoption in the U.S. could potentially cause major issues, such as gradually eroding certain entry-level jobs and ramping up economic uncertainty.

“It’s clear that AI is already making a massive impact on the U.S. economy,” Thomas Savidge, a research fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research, told the DCNF. “There will likely be job disruptions while also seeing improvements in quality of life as AI becomes better able to take on more mundane tasks. How this change gets shaped is the big question.”

“If politicians and bureaucrats create complex legal frameworks out of panic, AI will be dominated by those who have the means and connections to navigate a regulatory labyrinth,” Savidge explained. “Enabling competition allows people to experiment, reward success, and dump what doesn’t work. Competition, not control, will ensure AI is used to make life better.”

In 2025, AI was responsible for an estimated 54,836 announced job cuts in the U.S., according to a report from global outplacement firm Challenger, Gray and Christmas released on Jan. 8.

U.S.-based Employers have cited AI as the reason behind 71,825 layoffs in total since 2023, the report found.

AI could also contribute to the erosion of some entry-level jobs in the U.S., according to Theresa Payton, CEO of Fortalice Solutions and former White House Chief Information Officer.

“As AI quietly erodes entry-level opportunities in fields once rich with trial-and-error learning, we risk severing the very on-ramps that produced visionaries like [Apple co-founder] Steve Jobs and [Disney CEO] Bob Iger—leaving future innovators without the raw, unscripted experiences that forge creativity and leadership,” Payton told the DCNF. “AI excels at synthesizing what already exists and executing prompts with precision, but it cannot replicate the unpredictable sparks of human intuition, moral courage, and paradigm-shifting originality that emerge only through hands-on struggle and real-world failure.”

Some Americans are likely to rely more heavily on AI programs in the workplace in 2026, according to Daniel Cochrane, senior research associate at the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Technology and the Human Person.

“We’ll definitely see [American] workers relying more on AI in 2026. One major reason is that employers are ‘AI pilled,’” Cochrane told the DCNF. “Every business executive is being told that if they don’t get in on the AI boom now, they’ll be left behind. Workplaces are proactively integrating AI tools into their employees’ workflows, and in some cases, requiring them to use the tools. But AI is not a fix all. Employees and businesses need freedom to experiment to figure out where AI makes sense and where it doesn’t.”

Moreover, Payton told the DCNF she thinks the ongoing expansion of AI in the U.S. may contribute to “elevated” economic growth in the current year.

“The [International Monetary Fund (IMF)] projects U.S. GDP at 2.4% in 2026, up from prior estimates, with AI investment and efficiency gains countering trade and policy pressures,” she said. “Goldman Sachs forecasts 2.5% expansion (versus consensus ~2.1%), and Vanguard assigns an ~80% probability that AI helps outperform baseline expectations, even as other factors moderate.”

Current AI systems can already replace 11.7% of the overall U.S. job market, CNBC reported in November 2025, citing data from a Massachusetts Institute of Technology study. Still, AI growth generated an estimated 8,900 jobs to the U.S. economy in 2024, according to a December 2025 report from the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation.

Cochrane also explained to the DCNF that some AI platforms have notably become advanced enough to where users can now “increasingly delegate complex tasks to AI agents.”

“Agentic AI is the thing to watch. The models are becoming advanced to the point where humans can increasingly delegate complex tasks to AI agents that can then execute those assignments and even bargain with other AI agents in a variety of commercial and non-commercial settings,” Cochrane said. “Imagine AI agents handling everything from calendar invites and travel bookings, to permit reviews and investing. This will dramatically lower transaction costs and make entirely new markets and economic arrangements possible.”

Agentic AI is a type of advanced AI system that can achieve a specific goal with minimal supervision, according to IBM.

Cochrane added it is still “too early to draw strong conclusions” about the “macro level” impacts of AI on the nation’s labor market.

“But early signs point to its disruptive potential in areas like coding, warehouse logistics, and administrative and accounting jobs,” Cochrane said, adding that American workers should expect that jobs which are “either routine or purely quantitative in nature” to face “significant AI disruption” over the next few years.

Additionally, 46% of U.S. workers reported they use AI in the workplace “a few times a year or more” in the fourth quarter of 2025, according to a Gallup survey released Sunday.

“The shape of AI’s trajectory will hinge on several factors in 2026: there’s the question of China’s development and use of AI, the possibility of an expanded AI regulation patchwork brought on by state legislators, and there’s the fact that the media has a penchant for only covering AI harms and omitting mention of AI benefits,” Kevin Frazier, an adjunct research fellow at the CATO Institute and a senior fellow at the Abundance Institute, told the DCNF. “Each of these factors may substantially alter the AI space.”

China has been attempting to dominate the global AI market in recent years. The country’s AI sector and related industries are projected to reach a market valued at $1.4 trillion by 2030, according to a Morgan Stanley analysis published in May 2025. 

Frazier also added that some American workers may be choosing to remain at the same jobs amid rising “economic uncertainty” due to AI’s nationwide expansion.

“Still, AI is certainly compounding aspects of the labor market that predated generative AI,” Frazier told the DCNF. “We’re in the middle of a Great Freeze — this low fire, low hire environment has more folks staying put for longer in the same job and more firms settling for the status quo amid economic uncertainty. This is a bad trend for economic dynamism – a healthy economy involves a high rate of job mobility.”

Investments in AI have surged across the globe in recent years. An estimated $1.5 trillion was invested in AI globally in 2025, according to the World Economic Forum.

A Pew Research Center survey released in September 2025 found that 50% of Americanas were more worried than excited about increased AI usage in daily life, marking an increase from 37% in 2021. Meanwhile, 10% of respondents were more excited than concerned and 38% were equally excited and concerned, the survey shows.

“Whenever forecasting the likely impacts of a general purpose technology, it’s important to keep Amara’s Law in mind: we tend to overestimate short-term changes and underestimate long-term changes,” Frazier told the DCNF. “That’s why I think [AI’s impacts on the U.S. in] 2026 will look more or less like 2025. That said, a few nascent trends from last year will become more prominent in 2026.”