The Bureau of Labor Statistics' new Employment Projections covering 2025 to 2035 point to a US labor market short on workers, not short on jobs, according to industry analyst Josh Bersin.

Writing on his blog this month, Bersin frames the BLS release as a direct rebuttal to widespread predictions that artificial intelligence will hollow out the workforce. His read: AI will lift productivity, but the country will still need more hands.

"The bottom line is this: the US labor market will only grow," Bersin wrote in a September post titled "US Workforce In 2035: A Few More Workers, A Lot More Output." The post itself stops short of naming the specific BLS growth figure, which sits behind a paywall on his site.

What does the BLS actually project?

The Employment Projections program is BLS's flagship decadal forecast. It rolls together industry output, occupation staffing patterns and labor force participation assumptions to produce a ten-year view of where the US economy will hire.

BLS published the 2025-2035 edition this fall on its news release page. Bersin cites it directly as the foundation of his argument that worker shortages, not surpluses, will define the next decade.

His post doesn't restate BLS's headline numbers. It points readers to the underlying release and layers interpretation on top: even with AI raising output per worker, the labor pool won't run deep enough to meet demand.

Why does this cut against the AI narrative?

Most enterprise coverage of generative AI has leaned on displacement estimates from consultancies and software vendors. Bersin's reading inverts that frame. Productivity gains from AI, he argues, won't translate into payroll cuts, because demand keeps expanding.

He links the two trends explicitly. AI productivity will rise. The labor market will still grow. That combination puts employers in a bind: they can't shed headcount to capture AI savings without leaving work undone.

For HR, the implication lands on three fronts:

• Talent acquisition stays a strategic function, not a back-office one, because competition for workers tightens through 2035.
• Workforce planning models need to assume a tightening labor pool even as per-worker output rises.
• Internal mobility, reskilling and AI augmentation become the primary levers for closing gaps, since external hiring alone won't fill them.

What's missing from the picture?

Bersin's post reads as a teaser for a longer paid analysis. The specific BLS figures — total employment growth, occupational shifts, the productivity multiplier — sit outside the freely available text.

That gap matters for HR leaders who want to pressure-test the claim against their own sector forecasts. BLS breaks its projections out by industry and occupation. Those granular tables will tell employers where shortages concentrate and which roles AI is most likely to reshape.

Readers chasing the underlying numbers should pull the BLS Employment Projections release directly rather than rely on the analyst summary.

What should HR leaders watch next?

The BLS 2025-2035 projections will anchor federal workforce policy discussions, state labor planning and corporate scenario modeling through the rest of the decade. Bersin plans to expand his analysis in subsequent posts, based on the structure of his site.

The forward question for HR: if AI raises output per worker but the US still needs more workers, where does the next million hires come from? Immigration policy, retirement-age participation, automation of the hiring funnel itself — each sits in the answer.

Bersin closes his teaser on a confident note. The decade ahead won't be defined by AI firing people, he suggests. It'll be defined by employers competing harder for the people who remain.