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So far, the narrative of AI in the workplace has had a consistent victim: the recent college grad, supposedly first on the chopping block as large language models automate the types of low level tasks that traditionally provided an on-ramp to office careers.
New evidence, however, suggests the tech may be impacting a surprisingly different segment of the workforce: those closest to retirement.
In a recent study by the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College, economics professor Geoffrey Sanzenbacher took a hard look at labor data in order to map AI’s impact on older workers in the United States. Comparing government job data against an AI-exposure index — a data set that tracks the degree to which certain occupations hinge on tasks that AI can do — Sanzenbacher compared the number of workers 55 and older leaving the workforce before and after the release of ChatGPT in 2022.
Though the researcher caveats that the “impact of AI on any workers, let alone those near retirement, remains an open question,” his findings point to an alarming shift. Prior to ChatGPT, older workers in the most AI-exposed jobs — highly-trained knowledge worker gigs like coding and tax preparation — were more likely to work later into their lives compared to those in manual labor.
“The types of jobs exposed to AI used to have a relative advantage with respect to career longevity,” Sanzenbacher explains. “In the post-ChatGPT era, the nearly offsetting bars for ‘not working’ suggest that this advantage has been greatly reduced, with a significant share of the increase due to unemployment.”
Though that general pattern still holds overall, Sanzenbacher observes that after the release of ChatGPT, the share of workers 55 and up leaving white collar work is surging. That’s not necessarily because folks are taking early retirements either; as Sanzenbacher writes, “after the ChatGPT launch… AI-exposed jobs saw relative increases in total transitions out of work and specifically to unemployment (but not out of the labor force).”
Said another way, growing numbers of older white collar workers are being pushed out of the airplane before they’re ready to jump, with little more than a blue Walmart vest as a parachute.
Like similar patterns observed around entry-level labor, this appears to be specifically impacting older white collar workers. Though the number of retirement-age workers leaving manual jobs like painting increased by about 2 percent between 2014 and 2025, that’s just a fraction of the number leaving high-exposed office jobs. For computer programmers, the number of exits rose by over 25 percent in the same period, while accountants and auditors saw a 22 percent increase.
It all points to an important question: if entry-level hiring has slowed to a crawl, and retirement-aged professionals are leaving in droves, how is the average worker supposed to navigate a labor market being squeezed from both ends?
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