Could AI Trigger a Global Recession? The Future of Jobs & Economy Explained (2026)

By Joseph Moss, International Banker

According to Sebastian Siemiatkowski, artificial intelligence (AI) could replace a substantial number of jobs, particularly white-collar positions, which, in turn, could lead to a recession. The chief executive officer (CEO) of the Swedish payment company Klarna has joined a growing group of analysts who are expressing their wariness over the impacts that this rapidly developing technology could have on global economic prospects.

Speaking on The Times Tech podcast on June 5, Siemiatkowski said AI development would have particularly profound implications for white-collar jobs. “And when that happens, that usually leads to at least a recession in the short term. And I think, unfortunately, I don’t see how we could avoid that with what’s happening from a technology perspective,” the chief executive of the renowned Swedish buy now, pay later (BNPL) firm explained. “Many people in the tech industry, especially CEOs, tend to downplay the consequences of AI on jobs, white-collar jobs in particular. I don’t want to be one of them.”

Siemiatkowski, who has long been known for his views on AI, especially the technology’s impact on human jobs, noted that AI was pivotal in implementing “efficiency gains” at Klarna and that his firm’s headcount had declined from around 5,500 to 3,000 people over the last two years as a result. Klarna has also confirmed that its AI-powered assistant now manages two-thirds of its customer-service queries.

Such trends are being increasingly observed worldwide, moreover, as the pace of AI adoption across the corporate world heats up. According to job-search site Adzuna, for example, the number of new entry-level UK jobs has dropped by almost a third since the launch of ChatGPT, with companies using AI to trim their workforce sizes. Vacancies for graduate jobs, apprenticeships, internships and junior jobs with no degree requirements have declined by 32 percent since the launch of the AI chatbot in November 2022, the research conducted by Adzuna and published on June 30 revealed. These entry-level jobs accounted for 25 percent of the UK market, down from 28.9 percent in 2022, the report also noted.

Such trends should not be surprising, given that many companies have been clear about their plans to use AI to scale back their workforces. BT (British Telecommunications), for example, has repeatedly confirmed that AI advances would likely lead to significant job cuts over the coming years. In May 2023, for example, the British telecommunications firm stated that it would replace 10,000 jobs with AI by the end of the decade, with roles such as call handling and network diagnostics in the firing line.

Since the appointment of Allison Kirkby as BT Group’s CEO in February 2024, moreover, the company’s intention to cut jobs has only intensified. Kirkby told the Financial Times on June 15 that BT’s plans to cull more than 40,000 jobs and strip out £3 billion of costs by the end of the decade “did not reflect the full potential of AI”. If the technology offered new opportunities for BT to run its business with fewer human resources, Kirkby confirmed that the company would have to adapt to remain competitive. “Depending on what we learn from AI…there may be an opportunity for BT to be even smaller by the end of the decade.”

Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, one of the world’s most powerful AI creators, has an even bleaker outlook for the future of the labour market. Speaking to Axios on May 28, Amodei warned that AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs in the US, especially across technology, finance, law, consulting and other such professions, sending the unemployment rate to 10-20 percent over the next one to five years.

He is urging AI companies and governments to stop “sugar-coating” this potentially disastrous approaching reality. “Most of them are unaware that this is about to happen,” Amodei added. “It sounds crazy, and people just don’t believe it.”

AI advocates highlight the jobs that will be required to manage the technology, while others contend that those gains will be outweighed by the job losses resulting from AI adoption.

AI advocates highlight the jobs that will be required to manage the technology, while others contend that those gains will be outweighed by the job losses resulting from AI adoption. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) estimated last year that 60 percent of jobs in advanced economies such as the United States and the United Kingdom are exposed to AI and that half of those jobs could be negatively affected. An estimated 30 percent of jobs in advanced economies are at risk of being replaced by AI, a figure that drops to 20 percent for emerging markets and 18 percent for low-income countries.

“The experience with previous waves of automation offers a warning here. During good times, firms are often flush with profits. They can afford to invest in automation and hold on to workers, even if the value-added of those workers declines,” the IMF’s first deputy managing director, Gita Gopinath, wrote in a May 30, 2024, piece. “However, in a downturn, these firms simply let go of workers to cut costs. Therefore, the extent to which automation could replace humans only becomes fully visible during or immediately after a downturn.”

In the next downturn, therefore, the IMF has projected AI to threaten a wider range of jobs than in past cycles, including higher-skilled cognitive jobs. “In other words, the pool of potentially replaceable workers in future downturns will be bigger than anything we’ve seen before. The result could be unprecedented job losses,” Gopinath also warned. “That could also lead to unprecedented numbers of long-term unemployed, because many of the displaced workers will lack the requisite skills in an economy where AI is increasingly prevalent.”

While Amodei and the IMF see the elimination of white-collar jobs as a key mechanism for economic crises, other factors could also prove decisive in causing major downturns. For one, the overreliance on AI-powered models could trigger unforeseen financial-market disasters that could send the global economy tail-spinning into chaos.

In October 2023, the then-chair of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Gary Gensler, contended that while generative AI (GenAI) technologies such as ChatGPT have the potential to upend the entire investing world, especially by leveraging large datasets to “predict things that were unimaginable even 10 years ago”, these new solutions come with great risks.

“A growing issue is that [AI] could lead to a risk in the whole system. As many financial actors rely on one or just two or three models in the middle…you create a monoculture; you create herding,” Gensler told MarketWatch. This could have severe repercussions should there be one or more flaws in such models, the SEC chief added, as they would reverberate across markets during periods of stress and lead to pronounced price shocks.

Similar views regarding AI’s increasing hold over the financial system have been echoed by several observers in recent years, with historian and author Yuval Noah Harari going so far as to suggest that the technology could trigger a financial crisis with “catastrophic” consequences. Harari, author of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, told The Guardian that AI’s sophistication makes forecasting its dangers difficult and that all potential problems that could arise from AI models should be involved in their safety testing.

Unlike nuclear weapons, there would not be one “big, dangerous scenario” that everyone understood, Harari added. “With AI, what you’re talking about is a very large number of dangerous scenarios, each of them having a relatively small probability, that taken together…constitutes an existential threat to the survival of human civilisation,” he explained. “What happens if AI is not only given greater control over the financial system of the world, but it starts creating new financial devices that only AI can understand, that no human being can understand?”

Harari also used the example of the 2007-09 Global Financial Crisis (GFC), which was partially caused by debt instruments, such as collateralised debt obligations (CDOs), that were understood by only a few people and were thus inadequately regulated. “AI has the potential to create financial devices which are orders of magnitude more complex than CDOs. And just imagine the situation where we have a financial system that no human being is able to understand and therefore also not able to regulate,” he said. “And then there is a financial crisis, and nobody understands what is happening.”