The biggest threat to a tech worker’s job may not be AI itself. Instead, it may be their level of AI literacy says a new study from Gallup.
Technology workers who used AI less than monthly faced an 18% layoff risk, triple the 6% risk for those who used it at least monthly. The gap shows up across the rest of the workforce too, at 5% versus 3%, but nowhere as wide as in tech. Despite this, only 1% of recently laid-off U.S. workers named AI or automation as the primary reason they lost their jobs. The story is likely deeper than one or the other being the predictive factor of job stability.
AI Literacy More Important Than Ever
The gap was starkest inside the technology sector. As Bloomberg reported from the Gallup research, tech workers who used AI less than monthly faced roughly an 18% layoff risk, triple the 6% risk for those who used it regularly. The pattern held across the broader workforce, too, and persisted even after Gallup accounted for age, education, industry and how long ago workers had been let go. The estimates draw on a February survey of more than 23,000 U.S. workers, including 660 who had been laid off.
The finding lands in a labor market that has cooled without collapsing. The share of employees who say their employer is cutting staff held steady at about 21% in the first quarter of 2026, after nearly tripling between mid-2022 and late 2025. Even so, more workers (34%) said their company was hiring than shrinking. Federal cuts skewed the picture, with nearly 38% of federal workers reporting downsizing, which was more than double the private-sector rate.
AI Isn’t Taking Jobs, It’s Defining Job Security
The most striking element of Gallup’s data is what it doesn’t show. Despite a year of headlines tying mass layoffs to artificial intelligence, almost none of the workers actually let go pointed to AI when asked, in their own words, why they lost their jobs. Most cited causes include restructuring, cost-cutting or the elimination of their role.
That sits in tension with how employers describe the same cuts. Outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas has attributed roughly 40% of recent layoff announcements to AI. The disconnect suggests AI’s role may be larger than workers realize: a job eliminated through “restructuring” can still be one a company expects software to absorb.
The reframe is already reshaping how workforce specialists read the moment. AI adoption is becoming a fault line inside companies, and the technology will likely influence who gets kept when firms downsize.
AI Literacy Isn’t The Entire Story
But the data invite a mandate they don’t fully support, and the sharper voices online have said so. Skeptics note that “triple the risk” is a correlation with survivorship hiding inside it: the workers who adopt AI early tend to be the same ones who are adaptable, engaged and in resilient roles. These are traits that have always been independently correlated with lower layoff risk. The honest read isn’t “use AI or get cut.” It’s that the qualities driving early adoption are the qualities that make someone hard to cut.
For executives, that nuance is the point. Whether AI fluency reflects genuine productivity, a proxy for adaptability, or simply which employees managers choose to keep remains an open question. Gallup framed the takeaway as one of workforce resilience: tracking how widely AI tools are actually used across teams offers an early read on how prepared an organization and its people may be for whatever AI does to work next.
