'Digital Me' is turning human capability into corporate assets. HR must push back
April 27, 2026
August 18, 2026
Economists urge HR leaders to watch the signals, not the headlines, on AI
3 min read
Deel’s Founding Economist, Lauren Thomas, believes that “rushing into large-scale restructuring as a knee-jerk response to AI hype” is the “biggest mistake” an organization could make in 2026.
She tells UNLEASH: “The productivity effects of AI remain largely unclear in both measurement and forecasting.”
Thomas is not alone in this view. In exclusive interviews with UNLEASH, three other labor market economists back up this view.
HR should not rush into “irreversible workforce decisions based on assumptions about what AI will eventually be able to do, rather than what it has already demonstrated it can do within their own organization,” according to Erik Stettler, Chief Economist at Toptal.
Indeed’s Senior Director of Economic Research, Pawel Adrjan, also calls for caution: “It is important to recognize that the economic environment has changed, while avoiding decisions that solve a short-term cost problem while creating a longer-term skills problem.”
Given the lack of evidence that “purchasing AI tools allows an organization to remove an equivalent number of jobs,” Lisa Simon, Chief Economist at Revelio Labs, tells UNLEASH that it makes no sense to make irrevocable bets “on the most dramatic version of the future.”
As AI begins to disrupt the labor market, these are the bets that HR leaders should prioritize instead.
Optionality trumps false certainty
Today, “there is not really one global labor market,” says Simon of Revelio Labs.
Instead, Simon argues that there’s a growing divergence in how people experience the labor market based on “where someone lives, the stage of their career, the industry they work in and whether their employer is meaningfully investing in new technology.”
He believes HR leaders often fall into the trap of asking experts for one single prediction, when a better strategy is to ask for a range of possible scenarios.
“The more valuable question is not ‘What will happen?’ but ‘What indicators should we be watching more closely over the next twelve months?’”
Adrjan agrees. He calls on HR to identify the signals to watch first to see how (and where) the labor market is changing.
The challenge then is to “separate cyclical weakness from more lasting change. A fall in job postings may be cyclical, but shifts in job design, skills, pay transparency and candidate expectations can be more durable.”
Design, don’t predict, the future
Competitive advantages for business, according to Simon, comes “less from predicting the future perfectly,” and more from treating this “a workforce design challenge.”
Stettler from Toptal notes that AI must be viewed as a “force multiplier for talented people rather than as a substitute for them.”
Simon adds: “Focusing on only how many jobs may be lost risks missing the much larger transformation already happening inside them.
“The more useful question is how work itself is changing.”
Deel’s Thomas says that forward-looking HR leaders are focusing on “which skills and roles will be strategically important over the next few years, and where they can find the talent needed to fill them.”
She adds that leaders need to focus on “where future talent pools will come from.” For Indeed’s Adrjan, this requires “integrating labor market data into their decision-making…[so] they can protect critical skills and prepare workers for changing roles.”
Simon specifically recommends that HR teams “pay close attention to the weakening position of people entering the labor market.”
Importantly, AI is not the only reason for this. Young people’s struggles to enter the workforce “began before generative AI” – but HR needs to focus on “preserving the pathways” for junior workers into leadership positions.
All these actions require discipline from HR.
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