What Is AI Doing to Jobs? The Data We Need Isn't Being Collected-Former BLS Commissioner Erica Groshen

AI is already prompting dramatic predictions about jobs and big policy proposals in response. But we still know remarkably little about what AI is actually doing to the economy. The reason isn’t that the data has been lost or hidden. It’s that much of the data we would need isn’t being collected.Dr Erica Groshen, former Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, joins me to explain why. She recently helped lead a group, under the auspices of the American Statistical Association, that produced 30 recommendations for modernizing the U.S. federal statistical system. The U.S. has no single national statistics agency. Instead it relies on 13 principal agencies spread across the government. These agencies depend on surveys at a time when survey response rates have been falling for decades. Legal barriers prevent them from sharing data even with one another.That gap matters right now. Erica’s team counted 1,010 studies on AI and the labor market posted in 2026 alone, and their results vary widely. To measure AI’s real impact, you need to know which firms are adopting it and what happens to the workers inside those firms. Our current system can’t connect the two. Erica explains what would fix that: enhanced employer wage records, standardized data, and agencies that can share and adapt.We also cover:

* Why the CPI is a blended data product, and how “owner’s equivalent rent” actually works

* How the BLS uses private price data, and what went wrong when a vendor raised its price fivefold

* Whether the recent surge in new business formation shows up in the jobs numbers

* Why productivity gains from AI are hard to capture

* Whether the statistical agencies should be consolidated, and why the group held back

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