ASA and Bullhorn now measure AI’s effect on hiring with real placements. Hands-on roles held up best, and the infrastructure behind AI adds demand for them.
By John Cambre, CEO, ResponsAble Safety Staffing | October 2026
What did ASA release at Staffing World 2026?
On Oct. 13, during ASA Staffing World 2026 in Denver, the American Staffing Association and Bullhorn launched ASA | Bullhorn AI Job Impact, a dashboard tracking how AI changes hiring by job category and updates monthly.
Most estimates of AI’s labor effects are projections: models of what software could do to a job. This one counts placements staffing firms have already made. Bullhorn’s head of research, Lia Taniguchi, drew that distinction at launch, contrasting forecasts with a measure of where AI is affecting work today.
ASA’s AI Impact Index combines Anthropic’s data on how people use its AI models with O*NET’s federal database of occupational tasks. It weights each task by importance and frequency, then sorts occupations into three impact levels. Bullhorn matches those levels to placement records from customers who opt into data aggregation.
Which jobs are losing ground, and which are holding?
ASA’s research, presented at Staffing World, found that about 70% of placements this year have been in occupations with medium or high risk of AI-related disruption. Most of that exposure sits in office, administrative, and clerical roles, where software can now take over routine tasks.
The monthly dashboard shows where that exposure is already registering. Placements have fallen across the U.S. staffing market since January 2023, though it’s an uneven decline. Jobs with the fewest AI-affected tasks, such as truck drivers and mechanics, are down 13%. Jobs with the most AI-affected tasks, like data entry keyers and customer service representatives, are down 17% to 18% (Bullhorn).
Hands-on work continues to gain share while administrative and design work loses it. Its researchers call the shift modest, and September partly reversed it. Other economic forces may contribute, but the data does not yet show widespread AI-driven job loss.
A second finding matters for anyone planning a workforce. Workers 25 and younger hold a smaller share of placements in high-impact roles in most months. Bullhorn offers two explanations: fewer entry-level openings, and experienced candidates filling the roles that remain as automation absorbs routine tasks and raises skill requirements (Bullhorn). If the trend holds, the bottom rung of many career ladders is narrowing, and employers will compete harder for workers who already have field experience.
Why is hands-on safety work less exposed?
Start with what the technology does well. Current AI models draft, summarize, classify, and extract text with enough accuracy to cover most of a data entry keyer’s day. EHS work contains plenty of that. Job hazard analyses, inspection logs, incident reports, and training records are documentation, which AI tools speed up. ResponsAble has written about AI cementing itself within credential screening and risk assessment across the safety field this year.
The rest of the job happens on site, and federal regulation assigns it to a person. OSHA’s construction standard defines a competent person as someone who can identify existing and predictable hazards and who has authorization to take prompt corrective measures (29 CFR 1926.32(f)). A camera system can flag a missing guardrail, but the standard requires someone on site with the authority to stop the work and correct the problem.
That split explains some of the data. AI expedites the paperwork portion of a safety role and leaves the field portion intact. For employers, the practical result enables safety professionals to spend less time on forms and more time with crews on the floor.
How does the AI buildout create demand for safety professionals?
ASA reports 2.7 million job openings in the AI-enabled labor market that the current pool of U.S. job seekers cannot fill.
Much of that demand is physical since AI runs on data centers, power generation and transmission lines, and building them takes large crews. A Lightcast report finds data center employment concentrates in the construction phase, with long-term operating headcount small by comparison. Those projects depend on electricians, HVAC workers, equipment operators, steelworkers, and inspectors, among other trades.
Electrical work accounts for about half of all labor on data center projects, according to Associated Builders and Contractors CEO Michael Bellaman (Insurance Journal). Industrial Info Resources expects the electrician shortfall to peak in 2027 at roughly 107,000 workers (Burns & McDonnell).
Wages reflect the strain. Construction hourly pay rose 3.4% from May 2025 to May 2026, against 2.4% for all U.S. workers, per Indeed data.
Immigration enforcement compounds the squeeze: foreign-born workers make up 35% of the construction-trades workforce, compared with about 19% across all industries (U.S. Bureau of Labor).
Each constraint reaches the safety function.
Larger crews, more subcontractors, and compressed schedules raise the volume of hazard oversight a site requires. Crews filled out with less experienced workers need closer supervision still. And the EHS professionals who provide that oversight are drawn from the same tight construction labor market as the trades they oversee.
Those projects land in sectors ResponsAble already staffs: power and utilities, industrial contracting, and megaprojects.
What are recruiters doing with the time AI saves?
As recruiters adopt more AI tools and use them more heavily, they can save up to 19 days per year. With that efficiency, they spend more time in direct conversation with candidates and clients, as answered in ASA’s latest Staffing Productivity Report, produced with corporate partner Prodoscore.
Weekly call time per recruiter reached 286 minutes in the first quarter of 2026, the highest on record and double the 143 minutes logged two years earlier. Over the same period, the average recruiter went from using one AI tool to 1.36, a 36% increase. Nearly half of tracked recruiters, 47%, used ChatGPT in the first quarter of 2026 (ASA-Prodoscore report).
ASA President and CEO Stephen Dwyer tied the findings to the core of the business. “Relationship-building continues to serve as a cornerstone of modern recruiting,” he said. “As staffing firms continue to embrace AI, recruiters will have more time to focus on developing the connections that drive long-term growth.”
The data matches what we see at ResponsAble. AI handles the administrative layer of recruiting, and the hours it frees go back into the conversations that determine whether a safety professional fits a site, a crew, and a client’s culture. Software can parse a certification. Judging field experience still takes a recruiter on an interview.
Are contract workers keeping up with AI?
Contract workers are adapting fastest. ASA-LinkedIn research shows temporary workers are 46% more likely to build AI literacy skills than their peers in full-time or part-time roles. Contract professionals move between projects, sites, and systems, so they pick up new tools fast. In safety work, that capability shows up in documentation: faster, more consistent records when an auditor or owner asks for them.
What should employers take from this?
The first placement-level data supports what field leaders have argued for two years: AI compresses the administrative load around a safety role and leaves its core in human hands. At the same time, the infrastructure behind AI is expanding construction in heavily regulated sectors where safety coverage is required. Employers planning data center, generation, or transmission work should budget for safety staffing early, because the labor market for experienced EHS professionals is tightening alongside the market for electricians.
Frequently Asked Questions
No, but it will change the role. AI will take over a growing share of safety documentation: hazard analyses, inspection logs, incident reports, and training records. The field work stays with people.
We staff safety and EHS professionals, exclusively. ResponsAble places temp hires for urgent, short-term coverage and project hires for specialized roles that run through a defined scope, typically 6 to 18 months. Our firm staffs nationwide.
Temp coverage can deploy in as little as hours. Project hires typically fill in two to four weeks.
Every candidate clears drug testing, a background check, certification review, and recruiter interviews before placement. After placement, a ResponsAble project manager stays in contact with the client and the professional for the length of the assignment.
Yes. ResponsAble serves power and utilities, construction, oil and gas, manufacturing, plant turnarounds, industrial contractors, and megaprojects. Data center, generation and transmission builds fall within those sectors.
Statistics on placement risk, unfilled openings, recruiter time savings, and AI literacy were presented by the American Staffing Association at ASA Staffing World 2026, citing ASA research with LinkedIn, Bullhorn, and Prodoscore. Statistics reflect the time of publication, October 2026.