Apollo study reveals AI is squeezing wages, not killing jobs, with $28 billion annual impact

The robots aren’t taking your job. They’re just making it pay less. A new study from Apollo Global Management’s Chief Economist Torsten Sløk and analyst Sania Edlich found that AI’s earliest measurable impact on the labor market is showing up in paychecks, not pink slips. Across 321 matched occupations tracked from 2015 to 2025, jobs with high AI exposure saw real wage growth come in 6.7% below their low-exposure counterparts after 2023. Employment levels, meanwhile, showed no statistically significant change. Who’s getting squeezed The wage hit isn’t landing evenly. Service workers faced a relative wage decline of 24.3%, the sharpest among occupational categories studied. Workers in the bottom earnings quartile saw wages drop 10.7% relative to peers in low-exposure jobs. Top earners? No significant effect. The study used a difference-in-differences methodology, a standard econometric approach that compares changes in outcomes between a treatment group (high AI exposure) and a control group (low exposure) before and after a specific event. In this case, that event was the explosion of generative AI capabilities beginning in late 2022. Crucially, the researchers didn’t rely on theor...