You’re not alone if you’re worried about AI taking your job in 2026, but one Wall Street executive thinks there’s no need to panic.
Andrew Slimmon, head of applied equity advisory at Morgan Stanley Investment Management, isn’t too concerned about AI fear trading or its impact on U.S. white-collar workers. He has no doubt that the technology will continue to be disruptive, but he doesn’t buy into one of the technology’s most popular narratives.
This week, the topic of AI-induced job loss exploded into the spotlight after a Substack post from market research firm Citorini Research predicted that white-collar jobs will disappear within a few years.
But in Slimmon’s view, this is just the beginning of a cycle of new job creation, similar to the dawn of the internet age in the early 2000s.
“We still work five days a week, we’re just more productive. And I think it’s going to be the same story again,” he said.
Slimmon recalls making similar dire predictions during the dot-com era, but argues that commentators largely missed how the economy would develop.
“Some functions have moved online, but that’s what we knew in the beginning,” he said. “Those businesses were hurt, but what we didn’t know at the beginning was that there would be new jobs eventually.”
Slimmon highlighted companies such as book publishers and travel agencies that were the first victims of the dot-com revolution. But decades later, these industries still exist. As such, he remains skeptical of doomsday scenarios that predict a world without software engineers and other white-collar jobs.
Despite a number of Big Tech companies, including Amazon, Block and Salesforce, moving to lay off employees due to AI efficiencies, Slimmon said panic is unwarranted and believes technology will change the nature of work rather than replace human labor.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said after his company’s latest financial results that while agent AI will force engineers to do other jobs in the future, he doesn’t think their jobs will disappear. This perspective is similar to Slimmon’s view on the impact of AI on the broader job market.
“I think right now we’re just focusing on the jobs that are going to be lost rather than the jobs that are going to be created. And that’s in some ways consistent with the earlier cycle.”
