The layoffs headlines keep coming, but new research from asset manager Apollo suggests the more common casualty of AI adoption is the paycheck, not the position. In a whitepaper published July 30, Apollo finds that workers in roles with high exposure to AI have seen an estimated 6.7 percent decline in wage growth since 2023, concentrated most heavily among lower-wage workers in service occupations. Apollo puts the exposed population at 5.8 million U.S. workers, about 3.7 percent of the labor force.
That framing matters for HR leaders building the AI business case internally. Board-level anxiety has overwhelmingly focused on headcount, echoing St. Louis Fed research tying AI hiring demand to a drop in entry-level employment. Apollo’s data points to a quieter, parallel mechanism among workers who keep their jobs: employers hold compensation growth flat rather than cut staff. For comp teams, that turns AI adoption from a workforce planning question into a pay equity one, since wage compression concentrated in lower-wage service roles is exactly the pattern that surfaces in adverse impact audits later.
The original insight is what this does to retention math. A worker whose job is safe but whose wage growth has stalled for two straight years has less to lose by leaving than one facing outright displacement, the opposite of what most AI transition plans assume, and a sharper version of the gap between AI’s promised and delivered payoff that Federal Reserve research on AI productivity has already flagged. As Apollo puts it, “the critical policy question is not whether AI will reshape the labor market more broadly, but how quickly, and whether workers will have the support they need when it does.” That support question, largely absent from AI governance frameworks today, is quickly becoming compensation strategy’s problem, not just policy’s.
Source: Apollo
