Despite AI leaders preaching about how AI can transform the workforce for the better, the public is not convinced.

A study published Thursday by Pew Research Center found that people broadly believe that AI will diminish job opportunities, rather than create them. The report, which included more than 42,000 people across 36 countries, finds that 46% of survey respondents believe that AI will lead to fewer jobs, while only 9% said it would lead to more. Around 13% reported that the tech would have a minimal impact on jobs, while 25% reported they weren't sure.

Although responses differed by country, Australia, South Korea and the US were the least confident overall about AI's economic and labor impacts. Around 76% of both Australian and South Korean respondents reported that AI will lead to fewer jobs, while 71% of US respondents reported the same.

Several respondents said AI would cause the middle class to dwindle by widening the gap between the rich and the poor, with 46% of respondents in the US sharing this view. Young people are also more likely than those 50 and older to say that AI will fuel the gap between the rich and poor, with 56% of young people in the US, compared to 38% of those 50 and older, reporting this belief.

While this study highlights how widespread public concern is about AI-related job losses, this narrative isn't new. AI is facing a PR crisis outside the Silicon Valley bubble, with a March report from Quinnipiac University finding that 55% of Americans felt AI would do more harm than good, and 70% believed AI will reduce job opportunities.

These fears may not be unfounded, and job losses appear to be hitting Silicon Valley first. Tech employers filed layoff notices for more than 14,500 Bay Area employees between June 2025 and June 2026, according to analysis published by Bloomberg on Thursday. But keep in mind that the San Francisco Bay Area employs about 375,000 tech workers overall, down about 7% since 2024.

Our Deeper View

There have been a number of conflicting narratives about how AI will impact the workforce, with some claiming that AI will create entirely new jobs that force companies to rehire laid-off workers, while some positions are already ripe for automation. But two things are already starkly true: First, companies can, will, and have used AI as a scapegoat to cut labor costs. Second, the public still largely distrusts the tech. This creates a dilemma for AI leaders: While enterprises are largely their cash cow, the frontier labs still need public buy-in to achieve their broader scaling and adoption goals. While the reality of how many jobs AI will create versus how many it will destroy remains unclear, the AI industry needs to do a much better job of articulating the opportunities for growth, because it's still losing the narrative.