The loudest story about the future of work is that artificial intelligence will take the jobs. A prominent labor economist is pushing back with a quieter, and in some ways more consequential, argument: the force already reshaping the American workforce is demographic, not technological. Svenja Gudell, chief economist at the jobs site Indeed, contends that the retirement of the Baby Boom generation, not AI, is the dominant story, telling Fortune that the labor force is projected to shrink meaningfully over the next several years.
The demographic math
The argument rests on simple arithmetic. The Baby Boomers, the large generation born after World War II, are aging out of work in a wave, and the younger generations following them are smaller. Indeed's analysis projects the US labor force declining by roughly 3.7%, or close to six million workers, between 2025 and 2032, as the youngest Boomers reach the age for full Social Security benefits. Fewer people are entering the workforce than are leaving it.
Gudell's team is explicit that this outweighs the AI effect. In its research, Indeed found that demographics dominated its models of the coming labor market, "no matter what we did with AI," and describes the result as a coming "great mismatch," as the Indeed Hiring Lab set out. Gudell has put it bluntly, calling demographic change "a huge one that's knocking on our door right now."
Why this inverts the usual worry
The standard fear about AI is displacement: too many workers chasing too few jobs. The demographic lens points the opposite way, toward scarcity, too few workers for the jobs that exist. And the mismatch is uneven. Indeed's work suggests AI's effects are concentrated in higher-wage, white-collar work, while the sectors facing the sharpest demographic squeeze, health care, construction and the skilled trades, are precisely the ones where AI can do least, because the work is physical, hands-on and hard to automate. A chatbot cannot staff a hospital ward or frame a house.
That divergence matters for how to read the labor market. Broad measures already show the pressure: the US labor-force participation rate, the share of working-age people either employed or looking for work, recently fell to around 61.5%, among the lowest in decades outside the pandemic. Part of that reflects people aging out, not giving up.
What it means for business and wages
If Gudell is right, the implications run in a predictable direction. A shrinking supply of workers tends to push wages up, especially in the hands-on jobs that cannot be automated or sent offshore. Employers in health care, construction and similar fields would have to compete harder, and pay more, for scarce staff, a cost pressure that feeds into inflation and into the economics of entire industries. Smaller and rural employers, with less room to raise pay, could feel it most.
It also reframes the role of two policy levers. Immigration becomes central, because it is the most direct way to offset a shrinking home-grown workforce; constrain it, and the labor math gets tighter. And AI shifts from villain to partial remedy: rather than destroying jobs on net, its most valuable role in this framing may be helping a smaller workforce do more, filling gaps that demographics are opening.
None of this is a settled forecast. It is one well-credentialed economist's analysis, and reasonable people weigh the AI and demographic forces differently; the pace of both is genuinely uncertain. But it is a useful corrective to a debate that has fixated on machines taking jobs while a slower, more certain force, a generation heading for retirement, reshapes the workforce in the background. Boursel does not give investment advice; the takeaway is that the demographics are not a forecast to argue with but a wave already arriving.
