More than 200 economists call for urgent AI workforce policies

HR professionals may have their hands full in the coming days after more than 200 economists and researchers – including 15 Nobel laureates – urged governments and employers to build labour-market safeguards before large-scale job displacement occurs.

In the joint statement titled "We Must Act Now," the experts said that AI could produce an economic transformation larger than the Industrial Revolution but compressed into a far shorter time frame. 

It calls on "economists, policymakers and technology leaders" to act now to understand the economics of transformative AI and to build the incentives, guardrails and institutions needed to steer the technology toward complementing, rather than displacing, human workers.

Anton Korinek, an economist at the University of Virginia who also works with Anthropic's economic research team, helped organize the effort alongside Erik Brynjolfsson of Stanford University, Ajay Agrawal of the University of Toronto and Tom Cunningham of METR.

"Steam, electricity, and computers each gave societies decades to adapt. AI may give us only a few years," Korinek said, according to a Reuters report. "We cannot improvise our strategy and institutions in the middle of the transformation; waiting for certainty means arriving too late."

Canadian employers in construction, skilled trades and technology may face volatile, concentrated hiring demand ahead, as a federal document shows proposed data centre projects nationwide could total more than 20 gigawatts, according to a previous report.

Nobel laureates, prominent academic signatories

Nobel laureates Michael Spence, Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson are among the signatories, along with Joseph Stiglitz, Paul Krugman and Ben Bernanke. Corporate leaders from major AI developers also signed, including OpenAI finance chief Sarah Friar, Google DeepMind chief scientist Jeff Dean and Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark.

The statement's authors say the transformation could bring risks such as large-scale job displacement, but also opportunities including major gains in living standards.

Its signatories span more than a dozen universities and research institutions across North America, Europe and Asia, along with staff economists from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google, according to the full list of signatories.

The statement stops short of naming particular occupations, sectors or timelines for disruption, and does not lay out specific legislative or regulatory proposals. It instead frames itself as a call to begin building institutional capacity and conducting research before the effects of AI on labour markets become clearer.

Global data point to uneven displacement, job creation

The statement's warning arrives alongside a growing body of projections from international bodies, government statisticians and private research firms, though estimates diverge sharply depending on methodology and time horizon. 

The World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2025 projects 170 million new jobs created globally by 2030 against 92 million displaced, a net gain of 78 million. The International Monetary Fund has estimated that almost 40% of global employment is exposed to AI, rising to about 60% in advanced economies, while Goldman Sachs Research has put global exposure at roughly 300 million full-time jobs, with an eventual U.S. displacement estimate of 6% to 7% of the workforce, or about 11 million workers. 

For Canadian employers specifically, Statistics Canada's experimental estimates found 86% of highly educated Canadian workers held jobs highly exposed to AI as of May 2021, compared with 38% of workers with less education, while PwC's 2026 Global AI Jobs Barometer found companies most exposed to AI posting 34% productivity growth since 2018 and paying AI-skilled workers a 62% wage premium, alongside faster headcount growth than less-exposed firms.

In the second quarter of 2025, 12.2% of Canadian businesses reported using AI to produce goods or deliver services in the previous 12 months.

Data on the impact of AI on jobs, workers