15 September 2026
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Principal Survey Finds Few SMEs Expect AI to Cut Staff and Wages

Tracks Principal Financial Group's 2026 employer survey on AI-related staffing and wages, including the 4 percent and 1.4 percent figures and the Moonshots panel's argument that small firms still expect hiring rather than an AI job wipeout.

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Overview

Salim Ismail presented a Principal Financial Group survey of small and mid-sized employers as a rebuttal to job-apocalypse tropes. He said only 4 percent of companies anticipate that AI will reduce staffing and wages, 31 percent expect increased staffing, the share saying they do not use AI fell from 19 percent to 10 percent, and only 1.4 percent attributed a staffing decrease to AI or automation. Peter Diamandis called it a great optimism story. The Principal write-up is more precise than the slide: 1.4 percent of all surveyed businesses, not only of firms that cut staff, blamed AI for a decrease, and the 4 percent figure is employers expecting both staffing and wages to fall because of AI over the next 12 to 24 months. Open questions remain whether SME expectations match later hiring data.

What changed

Dates show when each podcast discussion was published.

  1. Salim Ismail cited a Principal Financial Group employer survey finding only 4 percent of companies expect AI to reduce staffing and wages, while 31 percent of small and mid-sized firms expect increased staffing. He said 1.4 percent attributed a staffing decrease to AI or automation and that the share saying they do not use AI fell from 19 percent to 10 percent. The Moonshots panel treated the figures as evidence against radical-unemployment tropes.

Podcast discussions

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Our coverage

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Salim Ismail answers AI job fears with a survey of 1,000 employers

On the Moonshots podcast, Salim Ismail put up a slide from a Principal Financial Group employer survey to argue that the jobs apocalypse is not showing up in the data: 1.4% of surveyed businesses reported a staffing decrease they attributed to AI or automation. The survey's numbers are narrower than the headlines they were used against, and the panel spent the rest of the segment on what changing work actually looks like — including a book that took three years the first time and six months the third.

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