AI reallocate – LPL Financial’s chief economist Jeffrey Roach argues that the wave of anxiety over AI displacing workers may miss a different outcome: new demand, new roles, and more hiring as technology makes work cheaper and faster to expand.
In recent months, the labor market has been hit by a familiar fear: that artificial intelligence will take jobs at scale, leaving workers with fewer places to go. That worry has spread widely enough to become its own kind of headline—and its own kind of economic weather.
But Jeffrey Roach, chief economist at LPL Financial, is pushing back on the most dramatic version of that story. He points to the Jevons paradox. the idea that when technology makes the use of a resource more efficient. demand can rise rather than fall. In Roach’s view. the mechanism matters: lower costs can open the door to more use cases. wider adoption. and more work—not just a faster way to do the same thing.
“AI may reduce the time and cost required to perform many tasks, but that does not necessarily imply a proportional decline in labor demand,” Roach said. His argument is that the impact on jobs doesn’t have to be a straight line from automation to unemployment.
“Instead, by making tasks, software development, customer service, research, and operations more productive, AI can expand the volume of work organizations are able to undertake and create demand for new roles, new products, and new business models,” he continued.
Roach doesn’t suggest AI will leave work untouched. He frames the likely change as a reshuffling rather than an outright erasure. “AI is likely to reallocate tasks instead of displacing humans. ” he said. describing a world where responsibilities shift to different kinds of work as organizations find new ways to operate.
He also offers a concrete example to show what that expansion can look like in practice. In medical diagnostic imaging centers. lower service costs can expand demand. and that can mean hiring rather than layoffs—workers are brought in to handle a larger volume of patients and tests as the market grows.
There’s another pressure point in Roach’s view: demographics. As more people move into retirement. the labor pool shrinks. creating a gap that employers may struggle to fill with traditional hiring alone. Working-age people are expected to make up around 62% of the total population by 2050. and less than 60% by 2070. according to LPL data.
In that scenario, Roach says, AI could become less of a job-killer narrative and more of a bridge. He describes it as a tool to “fill that gap by boosting how much each worker can produce rather than relying on a larger workforce.”
artificial intelligence AI jobs labor market Jevons paradox LPL Financial Jeffrey Roach hiring automation demographic aging working-age population