Why a Morgan Stanley portfolio manager isn't fretting over viral concerns about a white-collar job wipeout

• As companies move to lay off workers and shift to AI, panic is creeping in across industries.
• But Andrew Slimmon of Morgan Stanley Investment Management isn't worried about AI disruption.
• In his view, the rise of AI will create new jobs, just as the dot-com revolution did.

If you're worried about losing your job to AI in 2026, you're not alone, but one Wall Street exec thinks the panic isn't warranted.

Andrew Slimmon, head of applied equity advisors at Morgan Stanley Investment Management, isn't too concerned about the AI scare trade or the ways in which AI is impacting white-collar workers in the US. While he doesn't doubt that the technology will continue to be disruptive, he doesn't buy one of its most popular narratives.

The topic of AI-driven job loss came sharply into focus this week when a viral Substack post from market research firm Citrini Research predicted a white-collar jobs wipeout in a few years' time.

But as Slimmon sees it, this is simply the beginning of a cycle in which new jobs will be created, similar to the dawn of the internet era in the early 2000s.

"We still work five days a week, we're just more productive. And I think that'll be the story again," he said.

Slimmon recalls similar dire predictions during the dot-com era, though he argues that commentators largely missed the ways in which the economy would evolve.

"Certain functions moved online, and that's what we knew first," he said. "Those companies got hurt, but what we didn't know initially, but eventually happened, was that there were new jobs that would come along."

Slimmon highlighted companies like book publishers and travel agencies that were among the first casualties of the dot-com revolution. Yet, in the following decades, these industries still exist. For that reason, he remains skeptical of doomsday scenarios predicting a world without software engineers and other white collar functions.

Even as many Big Tech companies, such as Amazon, Block and Salesforce, move to lay off workers, citing AI efficiency gains, Slimmon said he's convinced that panic isn't warranted, and the technology will change the nature of work rather than replace human labor.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said after his company's latest earnings that he thinks agentic AI will lead to engineers having different work to do in the future, but their jobs will not be eliminated. This perspective is similar to Slimmon's view on the impact of AI on the broader job market.

"I just think right now, we're just focused on the jobs that are going to be lost, not the jobs that are going to be created. And that's kind of that's consistent with early cycle