Companies spending the most on AI aren't the ones cutting jobs. They're the ones hiring the most.
That's the finding from a new joint analysis by Revelio Labs and Ramp covering more than 21,000 US firms. Companies in the top third of per-employee AI spending grew headcount 10% in the two years after they adopted, and entry-level headcount grew 12%. The threshold to count as a heavy adopter wasn't even high. About $30 per employee per month in the first three months, which is roughly the cost of a ChatGPT Team seat.
Ramp economist Ara Kharazian put it plainly: "If you are a young person entering the labor market and choosing between two otherwise similar firms, choose the one that's using AI. It's more likely to grow faster." His other line is the one worth bookmarking: "If you are reading headlines where CEOs blame layoffs on AI, be skeptical."
That second point matters because the headlines are very real. According to the May 2026 Challenger report, AI was cited as the reason for 38,579 layoffs in May alone. That's 40% of all announced cuts for the month, and the third month in a row that AI has topped the list. Through May, AI has been blamed for 87,714 job cuts in 2026, which already blows past the 54,836 attributed to AI in all of 2025.
So both things are true at the same time. The companies investing in AI are growing. The companies citing AI as the reason for layoffs are also growing. The interesting question is what's actually driving the cuts.
Andy Challenger, who runs the firm behind the layoff report, isn't ready to call AI the villain. He pointed to a sharp rise in cuts tied to mergers and bankruptcies, which suggests companies are restructuring aggressively and reaching for the most convenient label. Cuts attributed to M&A alone are up more than sixfold year over year. AI makes a better headline than "we overhired in 2022."
There's a generational layer worth holding on to as well. ADP chief economist Nela Richardson wrote in June that AI's aggregate impact on jobs is still modest, but the picture changes when you split by career stage. Early-career roles are taking the hit. The Revelio finding of 12% growth in entry-level hiring cuts against that, but only because it's looking at the firms actively investing rather than the ones retrenching.
Stanford's Erik Brynjolfsson, who has been tracking this for years, said the honest answer is that nobody has the full picture yet: "We are flying blind into one of the most consequential periods in world history."
INTO THE VALLEY
The cleanest read on all of this is that AI is doing what every major technology shift has done before, which is reward the companies leaning in and expose the ones using it as a cost-cutting excuse. The firms hiring more are the ones using AI to expand what they can do. The firms blaming AI for layoffs are mostly firms that needed to cut anyway and found a quieter way to say it. If you want to know which side a given company is actually on, look at what they're spending, not what they're announcing.
