I'm sure this is purely due to awesome AI and not the long term fallout from Brexit. The investment bank conducting the "research" is surely not invested in AI either.

I do not see any compelling evidence or numbers to prove it on the article. Also, as a political write up it should consider other facts that can have influenced on the those outputs.

I wish journalism was not used for other purposes rather than what it is being used for

Oh Yeah, it's the AI. It can't be that GDP growth has stalled to 0.1 per quarter. We are definitely not heading for a recession guys. It's all unicorns rainbows and robot butlers in our future.

Over only the last 12 months, the comparators only include one other western European economy (so if its hitting France harder, for example, it would not be mentioned), its based on what companies say (which may not be accurate, or even honest). The UK economy is weak, and a number of the other economies in the comparison are just as weak, or weaker, and the UK's unemployment rate is rising from very low levels - unemployment in 2022 was the lowest it had been since the 70s. On the other hand Germany's rate is still higher than the UK's (and has been for many years) and had been rising until recently.

The other data is which jobs have seen the greatest falls in advertised vacancies. If you look at the graph it looks compelling with programmers and management consultants at the bottom - but these are also jobs that were likely to do badly in any downturn anyway.

There are also falls in vacancies for jobs completely unrelated to AI - bar staff, vets, vehicle cleaners, boat builders.... look at the graph on Bloomberg:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-01-26/ai-job-cu...

A big issue is that by scalping out early stages of careers AI could create a large impact on employee development.

If AI means you don't need to hire so many 2-5 year experience employees it means you're not creating 5year + experience employees available for the market.

This might mean that AI expands it's niche, as experienced employees become more scared we'll have to push more of their work onto AI.

I'm not sure it's going to be all industries that have this issue. Some are far more reliant on junior roles.

Like SWE, but also accountants, lawyers and their paralegals, etc.

In the UK in particular the high costs associated with large workforces mean it's just too nice to cut headcount.

It's easier to say AI than it is to say "we can't really compete with china and the US and also brexit was a mistake".