The Jobs AI Was Supposed to Kill Grew Fastest in October: Consulting Added 17,300 as Professional Services Gained 70,000

Consulting firms, law offices and accounting businesses — three of the industries most routinely ranked as the most exposed to AI — added jobs in October at the fastest pace in years. US professional and business services grew by 70,000 positions last month, the Labor Department said Friday, the sector's largest monthly gain since July 2022, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis by Ian Hodgson. The Washington Post covered the same print with a blunter headline: white-collar hiring is jumping, complicating the AI story.

Within the sector, management, scientific and technical consulting services added 17,300 jobs over the month, legal services added 2,400 and accounting and related services added 2,300, per the Journal. Temp agencies contributed roughly 19,000, the Post noted. Harvard economist David Deming told the Journal: "I don't know how you could look at this report and conclude that we're entering anything like a white-collar job apocalypse." Preston Mui, a senior economist at Employ America, put it almost as plainly: "It's not the bloodbath among knowledge workers that a lot of people had feared. At least not yet."

The detail inside the aggregates tells a more interesting story than the headline. Year over year through September, document-preparation services cut employment 17 percent, telephone call centers and public-relations agencies each lost 4.7 percent, and advertising agencies shed 3.9 percent — precisely the entry-level, repetitive roles economists have long said AI would absorb first. Meanwhile law offices grew 1.9 percent and management consulting 1.4 percent. Firms that design computer systems for other businesses employ about 26,000 fewer people than a year ago, much of it outsourced programming, Fifth Third chief US economist Bill Adams told the Post, where companies "can do the same work with fewer people in many cases because of AI."

There are caveats in both directions. Brian Bethune of Boston College warned that October's bump could be a "head fake" from election-season spending on consultants, ads and temp workers, and expects agencies to shed about 20,000 jobs in November as campaigns wind down. Industry-level data also masks occupational shifts, since figures group workers by employer rather than job function — a firm can eliminate administrative roles while hiring elsewhere. And companies that overhired during the pandemic began cutting around ChatGPT's November 2022 launch, making it hard to attribute any given layoff to AI rather than management error.

The AI economy is also creating jobs downstream of the models. Employers in nonresidential construction and specialty trade contractors added a combined 10,800 positions, driven largely by data-center projects, where construction spending has climbed nearly 80 percent since the start of the year even as other nonresidential construction fell 4 percent. A July Indeed study found that job postings mentioning data centers more than doubled between June 2024 and June 2026, with about a quarter targeting installation and maintenance workers. Indeed economist Cory Stahle says employers are "leaning in to experienced workers and AI skills," adding requirements rather than eliminating roles.

One month is not a trend, and November's print will show how much of October was campaign money. But the data so far supports the productivity narrative rather than the displacement one: AI pressure is concentrating on junior, repetitive work while higher-skill white-collar roles, so far, are getting bigger. "It turns out AI is broad but not that deep," Deming said. "Until it can do the entirety of someone's job, it's hard to plug it in to totally replace a worker."