Good morning. AI may be dominating boardroom conversations, but a handful of giant employers are driving AI hiring in the U.S.
“I think we’re overestimating the speed at which we’re going to see this transformation,” Svenja Gudell, chief economist at Indeed, said on Tuesday to a room of executives during a panel session at the 2026 Fortune Workplace Innovation Summit in Atlanta about the pace of the labor market’s AI transformation. “I think we’re underestimating the long-term impact it will have.”
Gudell was responding to Fortune‘s Ruth Umoh, who pointed to Indeed’s Hiring Lab analysis of 2025 data. As of late 2025, 5.7% of U.S. firms had posted at least one AI-related job on Indeed, up from roughly 2% in 2018, and about 4% of all job postings mentioned AI at all, according to Indeed’s report released in January. Yet nearly 90% of those AI-related postings came from just 1% of companies, with adoption rates reaching 49.9% among the largest firms compared with only 1.3% among the smallest third. According to Indeed’s May 14 report, over 5% of job postings on the platform now mention AI, as of April 2026.
AI is going to significantly change the way we do things, “not tomorrow or the day after, but months and years into the future,” Gudell said. “I think it’s so important to have the data and to be able to act now to kind of kick off the things that you need to do in order to be set up for tomorrow,” she said, adding that while it’s a difficult task, it’s also really important. Gudell also said that the sectors most exposed to AI, are seeing growth in job demand.
AI hiring in the U.S. is currently concentrated among large technology companies, hyperscalers, and major consulting and professional-services firms, although adoption is gradually spreading to other sectors.
Becky Schmitt, chief people officer at PepsiCo, was also a panelist and provided a perspective on what it takes to keep the entire organization on the same page when it comes to AI transformation. Managing the reality that some parts of the organization move faster than others is something the company is working on internally right now, along with deciding which scalable pieces to invest in, Schmitt said.
Her recommendations on scaling? “The way that you make it scalable is by having standard processes, accepting common data sets, having core parts of your job that have, one job in one country and another be translatable, so then the technology can move,” Schmitt explained.
She added: “But if you want to let everybody have their own kingdom, you’re going to invest heavily in one part of the world, and then it can’t go someplace else.”
Sheryl Estrada [email protected]
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