A slew of recent studies indicate that AI isn’t dramatically displacing workers. At the same time, there were no indicators that the fast-moving technology is creating a lot of jobs, even as AI skills remain in high demand.

Stanford University researchers in an August study found that any AI-related job declines were concentrated among young workers aged 22–25. But for older and more experienced workers that wasn’t the case.

“Claims of economy-wide AI-driven job losses are not visible in payroll data through June 2026,” the researchers said, citing ADP payroll information. Stanford partnered with ADP to conduct the research.

The decline for young workers is more often related to the automation of some work tasks by AI, as opposed to its use to complement work. In contrast, AI is more often used by experienced workers to augment what they do. 

According to the Stanford report, workers between 22 and 25 and employed in jobs highly exposed to disruption by AI are falling behind their older counterparts. Their employment levels in June were about 19% below the same age group in less-exposed occupations. That’s compared to where they would be if both groups had kept pace with each other.

“Experienced workers show no comparable gap,” the researchers said, adding that “this is consistent with recent reports of a worsening job market for entry-level workers.”

Employment of younger workers in AI-exposed jobs fell about 11% from late 2022, while the same age group in less-exposed jobs actually grew about 10%. “For older age groups, we find much less marked differences in employment growth across AI exposure quintiles,” the researchers said.

Stanford, which created a lab last year to study AI’s impact amid heightened fears of the technology’s economic effects, said its numbers were based on available indicators.

AI’s adverse impact on young workers has been well documented, with many of them laid off in the initial wave of AI automation. AI has also suppressed wages for entry-level workers.

AI was cited for 116,175 job cuts in 2026, but that number is declining. The technology  was blamed for 3,462 cuts in August, according to data from Challenger, Gray and Christmas.

It’s the “lowest monthly total since December 2025 when 142 cuts were attributed to AI,” the company wrote in a blog entry. The research firm also noted aggressive hiring plans for companies in 2027.

AI is adding value to companies in different ways, and humans are an important part of that process, said Michael Chui, a senior fellow at QuantumBlack, AI at McKinsey. “The night shift is real now,” he said. “People are sending off their agents to write code and checking in the morning.”

MIT late last year established an AI labor index to determine how agents are affecting the workforce. The school’s Project Iceberg looks at how the coordination and interaction with agentic AI changes how work is done.

Despite the disruptions, demand for AI-related talent continues to rise, tech industry consortium CompTIA said last week. About 320,000 job listings in August required AI-related capabilities, a 4.5% increase from July.

AI-related hiring is outperforming the broader tech market, with demand for AI skills up 96% year-over-year, said Kye Mitchell, head of Experis North America, which is part of ManpowerGroup.

“We’re seeing real growth…in marketing management and project management roles, suggesting employers are looking beyond the people building AI to the people applying it,” Mitchell said.

More broadly, the US economy added 162,000 jobs in August, according to US Department of Labor figures released last week. CompTIA noted that tech employment across all sectors rose by 86,000 workers in August.

But within the tech sector, 14,700 positions were cut, CompTIA said.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang argues it’s the “most illogical thing in the world” to believe AI will kill SaaS, and says the markets “got it wrong” in sending SaaS stocks tumbling. Why “illogical”? Because, as analyst Benedict Evans stresses, the fact that everyone can now easily spin up code actually doesn’t solve any SaaS problems, because creating code and tools is the easy part: “The hard part is knowing that you need a tool for this in the first place and then knowing what the tool should do.”

If that’s true, then what Shopify is doing with Sidekick is potentially revolutionary by embracing and extending the traditional SaaS model.

In December, Shopify introduced custom app generation through Sidekick. A merchant (Shopify customer) describes a tool, and Sidekick writes the code, using Shopify’s interface components and connecting to its Admin API. It’s a cool option and has been very popular. Shopify says merchants created almost 4,000 custom apps in the first three weeks following the release.

This isn’t surprising: Shopify is delivering the customization customers have long wanted from enterprise SaaS while ensuring they still enjoy the comfort of ongoing support and platform stability.

I suspect we’ll see more enterprise SaaS like this, despite silly predictions that AI would kill SaaS. Cheaper code gives customers a way to fix the things they dislike about an application without replacing everything they do like. For a vendor willing to accommodate that, AI could make its product considerably more useful and, hence, much “stickier.”

The feature that never ships

Cloudflare’s Jeremy Morrell discusses this in an excellent essay on extensible software. “In the past year, your users have suddenly acquired the ability to speak code into existence,” he writes, allowing for “markets of one.” His argument is that software should let customers put that ability to work, building additions around an established core.

Morrell has a commercial interest here, which he discloses: He works at Cloudflare and thinks its infrastructure is well suited to running those additions. He’s not wrong. But it’s the general opportunity to match customizability with stability that matters so much.

There are really (really) good reasons why vendors haven’t allowed customizability of their core products. Enterprise software companies limit deep customization to prevent high maintenance costs, security risks, and broken system updates. Oh, and to prevent their products from becoming convoluted bloatware. No matter how much you may want feature X, that feature would likely be irrelevant to almost everyone else, so adding it would complicate the product for the majority. No one wants that.

Customers have long paid consultants to customize software or they’ve hired developers to do it themselves (all while taking care not to violate their vendor licenses). Morrell points to Salesforce, which has spent years letting businesses build their own logic into its platform. In other words, AI didn’t invent extensibility. No, AI just makes it incredibly cheap. There’s a meaningful opportunity here for customers who can describe the change they need but have never been able to get it built. Some will save money on software or customizations they previously bought, while others will finally get software that nobody could profitably sell them.

Following the money

This change, however welcome for enterprises, won’t be comfortable for developers selling a narrow reporting tool or a small workflow improvement. Their customers may decide that an LLM-generated extension is good enough. An AI-built customization needn’t match every feature of the commercial product. It only has to do the job that the customer was paying for.

The platform underneath that extension has a different calculation. Every useful tool built against its data and APIs gives the customer another reason to stay. AI can make an individual feature less valuable to sell while making the product that hosts it more valuable to own. (Yet another reason to tsk-tsk foolish eulogies for SaaS companies.)

Ultimately, this should benefit anyone who both knows the business and can build more efficiently for that business. Benedict Evans makes this point in his newsletter, arguing that cheaper coding doesn’t solve the problem of discovering what software ought to do or persuading an organization to use it. A useful idea that spans several departments still needs those departments to agree. Even excellent code can’t sign off on a new way of running accounts payable.

Evans also describes how improvised tools eventually become important enough to need formal ownership and support. Anyone betting that companies will happily maintain everything they can generate should spend some time with the person who inherited the last departmental spreadsheet. Silicon Valley folks with little knowledge of real-world enterprises might think enterprises will vibe code all their software now, but they won’t. That’s not how software works because it’s not how people work.

This cuts both ways for established software vendors. Customers may continue to need their expertise while becoming less willing to accept a product’s limitations. A vendor that makes customization easy can benefit from that impatience, while one that blocks it has given the customer a new reason to investigate alternatives. The difficult decisions will come when customization interferes with what the vendor already sells.

I wrote in 2022 about Microsoft’s complicated relationship with open source, and how a company’s broad commitment to openness can collide with a division’s revenue targets. The same tension applies here. A CEO can be excited about letting customers build anything. The executive responsible for selling the premium reporting package may be less enthusiastic. Resolving that disagreement will determine what customers actually get to build, however capable the AI becomes.

Getting comfortable

Customers have their own calculations to make. An application shaped around the way your company works can be wonderful, but it can also be a pain to leave.

There are limits to what Shopify’s generated apps can do today. They are admin tools, not storefront or checkout extensions. Shopify also tells merchants to test them before installation because they can change customer-facing data. A generated app can be wrong, and running it inside a familiar product doesn’t relieve the merchant of checking its work.

Shopify lets merchants inspect and edit the generated code and restore an earlier version. That’s useful, but code written for Shopify’s Admin API still depends on Shopify. Having the source doesn’t give you another company ready to run it unchanged.

AI might eventually make moving those extensions easier, too. But recreating a screen is one thing; reproducing the behavior it relies on throughout a business is a considerably bigger undertaking. That includes the assumptions about records and transactions that the custom code gets to take for granted while it runs on the original platform.

None of this makes customization a bad deal. Customers can gain more control over their daily work while, somewhat ironically, becoming more dependent on a supplier. For SaaS vendors, that’s a good commercial reason to let customers finish the bits their developers will never get around to building, even when it costs them an add-on sale (and potentially some support headaches, depending on how they’re architected for extensibility). The customer is doing work that makes the underlying product more valuable.

AI, in short, has the potential to make SaaS dramatically more valuable, not extinct.

Google’s dominance in the search arena has given rise to two major antitrust lawsuits from the US government alleging the company has manipulated the market to maintain that dominance, to the exclusion of competitors and the detriment of the public at large.

The first lawsuit, targeting Google’s search business, kicked off in mid-September 2023 and drew to a close in May 2024; US District Judge Amit Mehta ruled against the tech giant in August 2024. The remedy phase of the trial ended in September 2025 with Judge Mehta rejecting the DOJ’s request to break up the company, instead imposing data-sharing requirements.

The second trial against the tech giant, focused on advertising, took place over 15 days in September 2024, with US District Judge Leonie Brinkema ruling against Google in April 2025. In September 2026, Judge Brinkema ruled that Google is not required to break off its ad exchange, instead opting for behavioral changes that have yet to be revealed publicly.

The cases heavily echo the turn-of-the-century Microsoft antitrust case in several respects, most notably that Google, like Microsoft before it, has evaded the forced breakup requested by regulators.

Here’s our condensed timeline of the two overlapping lawsuits and their progress through the court system.

Sep. 2, 2026, advertising lawsuit: In a second big win for Google, Judge Brinkema rules that the company does not have to sell its AdX ad exchange. The search giant is also not required to open-source the final-auction logic in its DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP) ad server or divest its DFP business. Behavioral remedies are sealed while the parties identify confidential information for redaction.

Sep. 2, 2025, search lawsuit: In a significant win for Google, Judge Mehta rules that the tech giant does not have to divest its Chrome and Android businesses as the US government had requested, and it will be allowed to continue paying Apple and other browser makers for default search placement. To level the competitive playing field, Google will have to share search index and user-interaction data with rivals and offer search results syndication.

April 21, 2025, search: The remedy phase of Google’s search antitrust trial begins with Judge Mehta presiding. Federal prosecutors warn that Google might leverage artificial intelligence to entrench its search monopoly, demanding “strong measures” to prevent the tech giant from extending its market control into the AI era. These include requiring Google to divest Chrome, end exclusive default search agreements, license its search data to competitors, and potentially sell its Android operating system if other remedies fail.

April 17, 2025, advertising: In a second landmark defeat for Google, Judge Brinkema rules that Google illegally monopolized the ad tech market. The company’s “exclusionary conduct substantially harmed Google’s publisher customers, the competitive process, and, ultimately, consumers of information on the open web,” she wrote in the ruling. Remedies, which could include the breakup of Google’s advertising products and/or changes to its business practices, will be imposed at a future date.

Oct. 8, 2024, search: The US Department of Justice submits a court filing proposing that the Chrome browser and Android operating system be split off from Google as part of sweeping remedies aimed at curbing the tech giant’s monopoly in online search and advertising.

Sept. 20, 2024, advertising: The US Department of Justice is set to wrap its case in the Google antitrust trial after an eventful two weeks. The tech giant is accused of engaging in monopolistic behavior by strategically acquiring certain companies and controlling the adtech industry’s most widely-used tools and exchanges,  beginning with its acquisition of advertising company DoubleClick in 2008.

Sept. 9, 2024, advertising: The second major case against Google begins with the company defending itself against claims it engaged in illegal behavior to maintain control of the ad tech market. The US government is accusing Google of purposefully manipulating that market, snuffing out competitors and gobbling up key technologies through acquisitions. If the DoJ successfully makes its case, Google risks being broken up by regulators.

Aug. 5, 2024, search: In a major defeat for Google, Judge Amit Mehta rules that the company had engaged in anticompetitive behavior in an effort to protect its search business. In the 277-page decision, Mehta was blunt: “After having carefully considered and weighed the witness testimony and evidence, the court reaches the following conclusion: Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly. It has violated Section 2 of the Sherman Act.” Mehta’s ruling did not include remedies for the anticompetitive behavior; those will be decided later.

May 3, 2024, search: Over two days of closing arguments, the DoJ revisits its case for Google having a monopoly on search advertising, and Judge Mehta quizzes both parties about whether other platforms could be viewed as substitutes for Google’s search advertising business. He hasn’t said how long he expects to take to reach a decision, but if he rules against Google, a second hearing will take place to decide on any remedies.

Nov. 16, 2023, search: The evidentiary phase of the trial finishes, as Judge Mehta issues instructions for post-trial submissions. Despite considerable amounts of redaction and closed-door testimony, the case revealed some unprecedented details about the relationships between the largest tech companies in the world, including the fact that Apple apparently keeps 36% of the search revenue from Google searches in Safari, and Apple once considered buying Microsoft’s Bing search engine as leverage against Google. Judge Mehta has scheduled closing arguments in the case for May 1, 2024.

Oct. 31, 2023, search: Google CEO Sundai Pichai takes the stand, for long-awaited testimony about the relationship between his company and Apple. He gave some details about Google’s negotiations with Apple over a contract that made Google the default search engine on Apple’s iPhones, iPads, and Macs. Google has paid billions for the privilege of being the default search on Apple products, and the relationship is a key part of the case – which was underlined by the Justice Department’s cross-examination of Pichai, during which he admitted that default search status is a major driver of market share.

Oct. 18, 2023, search: Google begins its defense, calling Paul Nayak, a vice president of search, to the stand as its first witness. Nayak downplays the importance of scale in his testimony, stressing that machine intelligence, compute infrastructure, and a team of 16,000 staff that checks on search results are crucial to maintaining quality of service. DOJ witnesses including DuckDuckGo CEO Gabriel Weinberg and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella had testified that Google keeps an edge over competitors via an ever-increasing trove of data — the result of its default search engine status, maintained through exclusive contracts and billions of dollars in payments to Apple, Samsung and other companies. This data gives Google an advantage in refining search engine results, they said. 

Oct. 3, 2023, search: As a witness for the prosecution in the Google antitrust trial, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella warns that Google’s monopoly profits could lock in publishers as AI-enabled search arrives. Nadella argued that it’s almost impossible to compete with Google, given the search leader’s massive competitive edge in collecting and analyzing user data. He also warned that Google, with its vast profits and lock on the search market, stands poised to extend its monopoly power in a new era where artificial intelligence technologies will turbocharge the search business.

Sept. 26, 2023, search: Apple’s Eddy Cue testifies behind closed doors in the Google search case, as critics slam presiding Judge Amit Mehta’s decision to hold much of the trial’s testimony from witnesses secret, allow documents to be heavily redacted, and block some documents from public view — mainly at the insistence of Google, but also at the request of other companies, including Apple. By the end of Cue’s testimony — and after a wek of wrangling by all parties — Judge Mehta rules that documents used during the trial can be published online at the end of each day, but still allows time Google and third parties to object to exhibits being shown publicly before the DOJ presents them in court. 

Sept. 21, 2023, search: Judge Mehta rules that public access to court exhibits, which have been mostly internal Google documents thus far, should be removed, after Google challenged the Justice Department’s regular publication of them. The company said that it was concerned for its employees’ privacy.

Sept. 12, 2023, search: The default search trial begins with opening statements, and the government begins its case.

Aug. 2023, search: Judge Mehta grants partial summary judgment for Google in the search case, saying that the government had failed to raise a genuine dispute of material fact on antitrust charges relating to contracts around the use of the Android operating system, as well as Google Assistant and IoT devices. The claims relating to Google’s exclusive “default search” contracts, however, are allowed to proceed to trial.

July/Aug. 2023, search: Google and the plaintiffs in the search case argue various motions in limine, designed to control what evidence should be included or excluded in the actual trial. Discovery and motion practice over evidence continues in the advertising case.

June 2023, search: Judge Mehta schedules a trial date of September 12, 2023 for the search case.

April 2023, advertising: Judge Leonie M. Brinkema denies Google’s motion to dismiss in the advertising case.

March 2023, advertising: Google’s motion to transfer the advertising case to New York is denied by Judge Brinkema, who orders the parties to propose discovery schedules within two weeks of the order. Two weeks later, Google moves to dismiss the case for failure to state a claim, arguing that the plaintiffs have simply produced legal conclusions, and not specific facts, that could support their claims. Judge Brinkema schedules pre-trial conferences for January 2024.

Feb. 2023, search: The plaintiffs in the default search case case move for sanctions against Google, accusing it of spoliation, which refers to the destruction, alteration or failure to preserve relevant evidence in a case. Elsewhere, in the advertising case, Google moves to transfer the case from the Eastern District of Virginia to the Southern District of New York, which is seen as an attempt to consolidate the case with related digital advertising antitrust litigation.

Jan. 2023, advertising: A second antitrust action, pushed by eight states and the DoJ, is filed in federal district court in eastern Virginia. The plaintiffs, who call for Google’s advertising business to be split up, accuse Google of manipulating its dominant position in the online advertising world to squeeze out rivals and control both the supply and demand side of the advertising market. Google, according to the complaint, thwarted fair competition by manipulating fees, punished advertisers for using alternative platforms and ad exchanges, and engaged in a host of further anti-competitive behavior in the interest of monopolizing the marketplace. (This is case that began in September 2024.)

Dec. 2022, search: Google moves for summary judgment against the separate Colorado case and the larger, DoJ-led case. A summary judgement motion is essentially a request by one of the parties in a lawsuit that the judge rule in their favor and end the case, arguing that, based on the undisputed facts, they are entitled to win the case as a matter of law.

May 2022, search: A deadline of June 17 is set for the production of all discovery materials. Further documents – for example, those whose is existence is first disclosed in late in the discovery window – can be produced until June 30.

May 2022, search: Judge Mehta denies a government motion to sanction Google for inaccurately classifying documents as attorney-client privileged. The plaintiffs had argued that emails on which Google’s lawyers were listed as recipients or CCed, but that the lawyers never responded to, constituted a misuse of the attorney-client privilege rules.

Dec. 2021, search: Judge Mehta conditionally splits Colorado’s claims from the case at large, ordering that separate trials on that state’s issues of liability and remedies will be “more convenient for the Court and the Parties, and will expedite and economize this litigation.”

Aug.-Oct. 2021, search: Discovery-related motions and orders continue, as Yelp and Samsung join the fray. (Those companies, like Microsoft and Apple, are relevant to the case even if they aren’t parties themselves, as their internal records are potentially relevant to Google’s liability.)

June/July 2021, search: The discovery process continues, and the US and Google both file several documents with the court under seal. (Microsoft files two sealed documents, as well, in response to Google’s subpoenas for company records, and Apple becomes involved after the government requests access to some of its internal information.)

March 2021, search: Meetings between Google and the various governmental plaintiffs continue, with periodic status reports on the discovery process.

Jan. 2021, search: Google files a response to the complaint, admitting to many of the facts alleged by the Justice Department and associated attorneys general, but categorically denying the substance of the government’s claims of illegality. Further responses to separate but related claims, generally to specific state attorneys general, follow in the subsequent weeks and months.

Dec. 2020, search: Judge Amit Mehta approves the joinder of Michigan, Wisconsin and California to the suit.

Oct. 2020, search: The Department of Justice, along with the attorneys general of 11 states, sues Google in DC federal district court for unlawfully maintaining a monopoly, in violation of Section 2 of the Sherman Act. The case centers on Google’s use of exclusive contracts that mandate its use as the default search engine in a host of different hardware and software applications, with the government alleging that this represents an artificial constraint on any possible competition for the search giant.