We need economic data at the speed of AI.

From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech.

I'm Megan McCarty Carrino.

We here at Marketplace love indicators that give us insights into which direction the economy is moving.

But AI is evolving fast, and it can be hard for the data and the people looking to it for clues about AI's effects to keep up.

So the Stanford Digital Economy Lab, with help from the payroll firm

ADP, recently launched its own AI economic indicators. They track things like AI adoption, productivity,

and of course, jobs. We spoke with Conahir Murphy, research manager at Stanford Digital

Economy Lab, about what they call

the Canary Dashboard for Jobs. Each month, we have a large sample of workers covering over 700

occupations, and we're able to compare employment trends for occupations that are very

exposed to AI versus least exposed to

AI.

We first start by looking at sort of canonical occupations that we think might be representative

of these different exposure groups.

So let's take customer service workers, for example, since the launch of ChatGPT in late

2022, customer service employment

among early career workers, so this is workers age 22 to 25, has been shrinking at 5% per year.

And then when we look at software developers, that decline is jumping to over 6%. On the other

side, we have occupations that are much less exposed.

We can look at home health aids, and their early career employment has actually been growing

at a pretty striking 6% per year. Ultimately, what we find is sort of these representative

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