Companies that spend the most on generative artificial intelligence grow their workforce faster than those that spend the least.
The study, “A New Look at AI’s Impact on Jobs,” by corporate card company Ramp and workforce analytics company Revelio Labs, tracked AI vendor spending against employee records at 21,559 companies in the U.S. from January 2021 to February 2026.
The number of employees of AI adopters increased by 10.2% in the two years following implementation. We believe this study is entirely driven by high spenders. Low-intensity adoption firms did not experience statistically significant changes in employee numbers over the same period. Active adopters saw a 12% increase in entry-level headcount.
A new layer of employment is forming between AI models and customers.
The pattern emerging at Google, Box, and IBM is not primarily about repositioning, PYMNTS reported on June 3. This is a new organizational layer that sits between the foundational model and business operations, with roles in place that didn’t exist three years ago.
Google is hiring hundreds of forward deployment engineers to help customers move its AI products from pilot to production. Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian said there is a growing demand for engineers who can drive agent development.
Box CEO Aaron Levie said AI has created 13 new roles at his company, including model evaluators. The role of model evaluator exists because the models themselves are not interchangeable, and model selection is important in actual operations.
IBM has announced it will triple its entry-level hires in the U.S. in 2026 as AI reshapes jobs traditionally assigned to new graduates. Nickle Lamoreaux, IBM’s chief human resources officer, said the company overhauled its entry-level software developer job descriptions because AI can now do most of the work that junior employees did a few years ago. IBM’s junior developers are spending less time on routine coding and more time working directly with customers.
Dropbox, meanwhile, plans to expand its internship and graduate programs by 25% for the same reason, citing younger employees’ familiarity with AI tools.
The gap between companies funding growth and those stuck in pilots
Another larger dataset pointed to the same mechanism. PwC’s 2026 Global AI Employment Barometer, drawn from more than 1 billion job listings across 27 countries, found that companies that were most able to leverage AI increased their headcount by 52% in 2025 compared to a 2018 baseline, compared to a 36% increase for companies that were least able to use AI. Wages at these same companies rose 24%, while wages at their lower-spending peers rose 17%.
The disparity intensifies at the entry level. Based on an analysis of 2.4 million entry-level job postings in the U.S., the PwC study found that lower-level jobs exposed to AI are seven times more likely to require traditional senior skills, such as leadership and judgment, than jobs with less exposure. Posts for these “senior” entry-level roles have increased by 35% since 2019, while posts for other entry-level roles have decreased by 10% over the same period.
Another PwC AI Performance Study, based on a survey of 1,217 senior executives, found that 74% of the economic value of AI is captured by just 20% of organizations. Top-performing companies were approximately two to three times more likely than their peers to use AI to pursue new growth opportunities, rather than simply layering AI tools on top of existing workflows.
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