A working paper from the Stanford Digital Economy Lab, released on November 13, 2025, found that workers aged 22 to 25 in occupations most exposed to AI experienced a 16% relative decline in employment after the spread of generative AI. More experienced workers in the same roles were largely unaffected, or even saw their employment improve.

What the data actually shows

The paper, authored by Erik Brynjolfsson, Bharat Chandar, and Ruyu Chen, is titled “Canaries in the Coal Mine? Six Facts about the Recent Employment Effects of Artificial Intelligence.”

The team used high-frequency payroll records from ADP, one of the largest payroll processors in the US. The 16% decline was measured after controlling for firm-level employment shocks. In English: even after accounting for companies that were already shrinking for unrelated reasons, early-career workers in AI-exposed roles like software development and customer service still took a disproportionate hit.

Crypto’s own version of the same story

According to a16z, roughly 1,000 jobs moved from crypto firms to AI startups since the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022. The crypto sector later attracted an equivalent number of workers from non-crypto industries. The net headcount might look stable on paper, but the composition of that workforce shifted dramatically.

Crypto.com announced a 12% staff reduction in March 2026, with AI integration pressures cited as a driving factor. Coinbase followed in May 2026 with a roughly 14% workforce cut, approximately 700 jobs, citing AI-driven restructuring. The jobs disappearing tend to cluster at the entry level: customer support, basic compliance screening, content moderation, junior developer tasks.

Job hiring demand across the crypto sector contracted sharply in early 2026.

What this means for investors and the market

If firms across both traditional tech and digital assets are systematically replacing entry-level labor with AI tools, the investment thesis tilts toward infrastructure. Protocols and platforms that enable AI integration, automated trading systems, AI-powered security audits, and machine learning-driven analytics all become more strategically important than raw headcount growth.

The 22-to-25-year-olds who aren’t getting hired in AI-exposed occupations today are the mid-career professionals who won’t exist in 2032. For investors watching the crypto labor market, the signals to track are not just layoff announcements but hiring patterns at the junior level.