CFOs Say AI Less of a Threat to Highly Skilled Workers

The past few weeks have seen numerous headlines about AI-related job cuts.

However, new research shows that America’s chief financial officers (CFOs) expect that artificial intelligence (AI) will lead their companies to cut just a small number of jobs this year, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported Tuesday (March 24).

The study, released this week as a working paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research, showed that CFOs say that AI will likely mean job losses for workers in routine, clerical and administrative roles.

Workers in highly skilled positions, like architects and engineers, are more likely to hold onto their jobs, particularly if they can use AI to their advantage, the report found.

It is still possible that workers with jobs that require more education and more training could eventually be affected, “but probably not in 2026,” John Graham, an economist at Duke University and one of the authors of the study, told the WSJ.

He said that CFOs have unique insights into their companies’ inner workings, as their job involves monitoring how a business uses its resources.

The survey, conducted with economists from the Federal Reserve Banks of Atlanta and Richmond, was carried out in late 2025 and early 2026. It showed that CFOs expected that AI would lower their companies’ head count this year by around 0.4%.

According to the WSJ, CFOs were twice as likely to say that AI could bring about job cuts as they were to say it would enhance work in office- and administrative-support areas like customer service, bookkeeping, or clerical duties.

But for other, more advanced jobs, the finance chiefs were more likely to say that AI would improve work rather than eliminate it, especially for roles requiring high levels of education.

As covered here, job cuts connected to AI tend to lead to fears of a wider employment crisis. However, current labor research shows that the situation is more complex.

For example, a study from the World Economic Forum argued that while automation and AI will eliminate the need for some tasks, they will also usher in new categories of work, especially in data, AI oversight, cybersecurity and human-centric services.

The report stressed that this will bring about a period of transition rather than permanent contraction. Many employees’ skills are expected to evolve over the next five years, which will mean retraining and adaptation.

“The pressure is real, but it is directional. Roles centered on routine information processing are most exposed. Roles combining domain expertise, judgment and technological fluency are expanding,” PYMNTS added.