Morgan Stanley this week published an AI disruption tracker designed to quantify how artificial intelligence adoption is affecting employment across occupations, industries and age groups. The bank's analysis identifies localized displacement that appears to be concentrated among younger workers and in occupations it classifies as having high AI exposure, while estimating only a very small effect on aggregate unemployment.
The tracker groups occupations and industries by levels of AI exposure and then compares observed labor-market outcomes across those groupings. In occupations that Morgan Stanley rates as having high exposure to AI, unemployment rates appear elevated relative to typical levels. However, when the bank aggregates the measured AI effect across the economy, it adds at most 0.1 percentage points to the overall unemployment rate.
Age-stratified results in the tracker point to clearer signs of softer labor demand for younger workers. Morgan Stanley reports early evidence that young people are experiencing more pronounced disruption in occupations with higher AI exposure, making them the demographic most visibly affected in the bank's analysis.
At the same time, the bank cautions that detecting AI-related displacement becomes more difficult once the analysis shifts from narrow occupation-level comparisons to broader economic aggregates. Morgan Stanley explicitly reports finding no detectable AI-related displacement in industry-level payroll data, underscoring how signals apparent in specific occupation groups can be masked at higher levels of aggregation.
The stated purpose of the tracker is to measure how AI adoption is influencing employment patterns across different sectors and age cohorts in the labor market. By examining both occupation- and industry-level metrics and disaggregating by age, the tool attempts to capture where AI exposure aligns with changes in unemployment and labor demand.
The bank's findings highlight an early-stage pattern: identifiable, narrow disruptions concentrated by occupation and age, paired with a small measured impact on economy-wide unemployment. The results suggest that, according to Morgan Stanley's tracker, AI's current displacement effects are limited in scope and magnitude, at least based on the metrics and grouping methodology the bank employed.