Tech unemployment rose in January as sector managed AI impact

Tech unemployment increased in January, hinting at the industry’s uncertainty even as hiring in the overall economy showed positive signs.

According to CompTIA’s analysis of the latest numbers from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, tech unemployment rose from 3.3% in December to 3.6% last month, with the sector losing 20,155 jobs—driven primarily by around 15,000 position losses in telecommunications.

One area of growth was IT and custom software services and systems design, which saw a bump of 800 jobs.

“The turnaround in services employment may indicate a shift toward capitalizing on investments in software and hardware,” Seth Robinson, CompTIA VP of industry research, wrote in a comment accompanying the report.

Job postings citing an AI skill requirement continued to increase, while specialized AI roles dipped. Both outperformed tech hiring as a whole, however—a testament to how the technology continues to impact the IT sector.

Data doesn’t lie. AI is frequently blamed for overall job losses, but the State of New York thinks that impact is overstated, Wired reports. The state has offered companies the opportunity to cite “technological innovation or automation” as a reason for layoffs in a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) since March 2025, and to date no company has attributed cuts to that option—despite 750 notices filed by 162 employers for nearly 28,300 workers.

Kristin Devoe, a spokesperson for New York Governor Kathy Hochul, told Wired that the data is useful for identifying the state economy’s weak spots. So far, that’s not AI.

Kelly Nantel, a spokesperson for Amazon, one of the companies that conducted layoffs in New York over the past year, told the magazine that “AI is not the reason behind the vast majority” of job losses at the company, leaving open the possibility that it is responsible for at least some.

Break it down. AI’s impact on the job market is felt more in how the technology can augment work than force staff reductions. That’s not the job-loss nightmare predicted by some experts, but it does align with what IT pros have been telling IT Brew for years.

Harvard Business Review, in newly published research on how AI is adjusting and changing work, found the technology intensifies tasks and leads to poorer time management.

HBR followed around 200 workers and reported that, over an eight month period, they “worked at a faster pace, took on a broader scope of tasks, and extended work into more hours of the day, often without being asked to do so” due to AI.

“You don’t work less,” one engineer told HBR. “You just work the same amount or even more.”