Gallup polling conducted in Q1 2026 asked employed American adults to describe what was happening to the size of their workforce. Respondents could say their employer was hiring new people and expanding, letting people go and reducing, not changing the size of its workforce, or that they did not know. The survey was conducted among 23 717 employed US adults, with a margin of error of ±0.9%.

Among employees at organisations that have adopted artificial intelligence, 34% say their employer is hiring and expanding — against 28% at organisations that have not. But the same AI-adopting organisations are also more likely to be cutting. There, 23% of employees say their company is letting people go and reducing its workforce, compared with 16% of employees elsewhere. AI adoption, in other words, lifts both figures at once.

AI adoption is showing up not as a jobs massacre but as churn. Firms adopting AI are both more likely to hire and more likely to fire, expanding in some areas while cutting in others — and Gallup's broader measure agrees, with 27% of their employees reporting disruptive change over the past year against 17% elsewhere. It is a workforce being reorganised rather than simply replaced.