Torsten Slok (토르스텐 슬로크), chief economist at Apollo Global Management, said there is no evidence so far that AI is reducing jobs.

Business Insider reported on May 31 that Slok, citing the ADP National Employment Report, said private-sector employment is still rising and companies are instead hiring workers needed to adopt AI.

In a recent blog post, Slok said demand is growing for AI implementation specialists and data center expansion is lifting wages for AI professionals as well as prices for semiconductors, equipment and energy. He said an AI spending boom is stimulating both employment and inflation. ADP's latest report also estimated that the number of people on private company payrolls rose by nearly 110,000 in April.

The key argument is that AI is creating new demand at this stage rather than replacing people. Slok wrote in April that lower input costs do not mean an industry shrinks and that AI will increase both productivity and employment. This time he explained it as the Jevons paradox. He said a rise in technical efficiency leading to higher consumption of the resource is appearing in the AI labor market as well. He wrote that "cheaper technology is creating more demand and more jobs."

That view overlaps with recent remarks by some people in the AI industry and finance. Box CEO Aaron Levie, Dell CEO Michael Dell and White House AI and crypto czar David Sacks posted over the weekend that they agreed with Slok's view. Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon also made a similar claim in an opinion piece in the New York Times last week. In a survey of 240 chief executives in financial services by EY, about 60 percent said staffing would be maintained or increase in 2026 due to AI investment.

Moves at companies, however, diverge from that. Since the start of this year, at least 12 large companies have cited AI as a reason for job cuts. Block CEO Jack Dorsey said in a memo in February that he would cut headcount from more than 10,000 to less than 6,000, saying the intelligent tools the company develops and uses and a smaller, flatter organization are "fundamentally changing what it means to build and run a company." He said the company could have reduced gradually over months or years while the changes unfolded, but decided to acknowledge the situation honestly and act now.

Cisco, Atlassian, Cloudflare, Coinbase, IBM and Snap were also cited as companies that have mentioned AI as one of the reasons for layoffs. By contrast, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang criticized in an interview in Singapore the narrative by some chief executives linking AI to layoffs as "too lazy." Sam Altman has also called the practice of blaming AI for workforce reductions "AI washing."

Ultimately, the issue comes down to whether AI is actually reducing employment or whether companies are using AI as a rationale for restructuring. Based on current indicators, Slok judged that expanding AI investment is leading to hiring of AI workers, data center construction and rising demand for related components and energy. But with major companies continuing to cite AI in layoff announcements, attention will be on whether future employment indicators keep supporting this trend.