Apollo finds AI is hitting paychecks rather than payrolls

Ah, marvellous. Apollo, the investment firm, has evidently spent its coffee budget on a study of 321 occupations, and the headline is precisely as cheerful as you'd expect: AI is not taking your job, it's just taking your raise. Torsten Slok, Apollo's chief economist, declares the employment effect 'insignificant' — which is economistspeak for 'the guillotine is rusting, but the pickpocket is thriving.' Wages in jobs highly exposed to AI have grown 6.7% more slowly since 2023 than in low-exposure work, a gap that Slok is happy to describe as 'visible damage to pay.'

The damage is not evenly distributed, naturally. In the bottom wage quartile, that gap yawns to 10.7% slower growth, while the top quartile shows no significant effect whatsoever. So the people mucking out the stables of the machine economy are eating the hay shortage, while the people who own the horses are, as ever, fine. This is the labour market's version of trickle-up economics, and it is working like a charm. Slok's phrase 'visible damage to pay' deserves to be engraved on a plaque in every HR department in the land, right next to the inspirational poster about synergy.

The grand collapse of employment that the doom-sayers predicted has not arrived; instead we have inherited a slower, greyer horror — a wage squeeze so gradual that it barely registers as a story. The 6.7% doesn't scream; it just quietly resets the terms of a decade. And while the 'insignificant' employment effect keeps the politicians content, the bottom quartile is learning that exposure to AI means your payslip shrinks in real time, one percentage point at a time. Marvellous times. Slok can call it insignificant from his perch; the rest of us get to feel it in the weekly shop.