Young Employment Diverged Across Five Professional Services During the Spread of Generative AI

Studies of artificial intelligence report different employment outcomes for different groups of workers. We use public Quarterly Workforce Indicators to examine employment at ages 22–24 relative to ages 25–54 in five professional-service industries across 47 states and the District of Columbia from 2006 to 2025. Between 2022Q4 and 2025Q4, young employment fell by 27.0% in computer services and by 19.4% in consulting, while total employment changed by −4.2% and +1.3%. Young employment grew in law offices and engineering and fell in accounting. The mean state young-to-older ratio departed below its historical path by 20.6% in computer services and by 18.4% in consulting, with unadjusted historical bootstrap p-values of 0.030 and 0.033. Both ratio declines exceed every one of the 56 earlier pre-ChatGPT three-year declines in this fixed record beginning in 2006. Differences across the five-industry departures are also unusual (p = 0.0049). The analysis does not establish how much AI caused these changes. The findings support monitoring employment by age and evaluating paid training responses as AI use expands.