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Is AI Causing More Early Retirements?
New research studies how the tech is affecting older workers
Rob Dobi
Key takeaways
- Older workers in AI-exposed jobs have been more likely to leave the workforce since ChatGPT’s arrival, while jobs less affected by AI saw little change.
- Research suggests workers age 50 and older are adopting AI at lower rates than younger colleagues, often because the payoff from learning a new tool may seem limited late in a career.
- Experts say AI could eventually help extend careers and boost productivity, especially when older workers combine experience with newer technical skills.
The first personal computers in the mid-1970s were clunky, heavy and expensive, but they transformed office work, greatly increasing what businesses — and their workers — could accomplish.
The advent of the PC was a challenge for one group of workers, however: older ones. Those who were slower than their younger colleagues to adapt to using the technology began to see their wages fall and left their jobs at higher rates or retired earlier than planned, according to a 2022 study published in the journal Labour Economics that examined career outcomes for older workers from 1984 to 2017.
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Now, another emerging technology could have a similar effect: artificial intelligence (AI).
Since the November 2022 launch of ChatGPT, workers age 55 and older have been more likely to quit or retire if AI can effectively do many of the job’s tasks, new research shows. For example, in fields most exposed to AI, such as computer programming, older workers were as much as 25 percent more likely to leave the workforce after ChatGPT arrived.
Other fields that saw increases in departures were accounting, auditing and management analysis. Jobs in which AI is unable to perform the tasks required — including painting, home health aides and nursing—saw hardly any bump in older worker exits since ChatGPT.
“We’re seeing people just get out of town because they don’t want to learn this whole new thing,” says Geoffrey Sanzenbacher, an economist and research fellow at Boston College’s Center for Retirement Research, who produced the report.
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Just as with PCs, he says, some workers think “if you don’t have decades of your career left, it may not make sense to learn an entirely new technology.”
An education in AI’s impact
Much of the attention on how AI is affecting job opportunities has focused on younger workers, including recent college graduates, who are facing a decline in entry-level jobs, in part due to AI, according to a 2025 report from the Stanford Digital Economy Lab. This spring, students at several colleges — including the U.S. Air Force Academy, the University of Central Florida and the University of Arizona — booed commencement speakers who tried to praise the new technology.
But younger adults aren’t the only ones reckoning with how AI will affect their careers. An AARP survey published this past May found that 24 percent of workers 50 and older consider AI to be a threat to their line of work, while only 19 percent see it as an opportunity.
Policymakers and researchers are beginning to propose potential solutions to address this concern. For example, employers should train older workers in digital, AI and information literacy, and provide paid time for older workers to practice using AI, advises a brief by the Urban Institute, commissioned by AARP.
It’s precisely these workers who have the critical-thinking and problem-solving skills to evaluate the quality of what AI produces, says Hailey D’Elia, a research analyst at Urban Institute and the report’s coauthor.
“[AI] will spit out answers and young people will then turn it back to the subject-matter experts” — their older colleagues — D’Elia says. Older workers “are a critical piece in this.”
AI, she says, “should not just be viewed as a disruption but also an opportunity.”
Resources such as the AARP Skills Builder for Work can help older adults take free or discounted online courses to learn about AI tools and other office essentials.
For workers and employers, a return on investment
Research suggests that older workers may need encouragement to try AI. A study by scholars at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, Vanderbilt University and Harvard University found that workers over 50 have been much slower than their younger colleagues to adopt AI. Fewer than 18 percent of workers ages 50 to 64 use AI at work, that study finds, compared with nearly 30 percent of those 18 to 29 and more than 30 percent of people 30 to 49.
“Even if you look at more highly educated workers, older workers tend to be adopting new technologies at lower rates than younger workers,” says Alexander Bick, a senior economic policy adviser at the St. Louis Fed and the report’s coauthor.
It’s not because older Americans lack technological literacy or are less willing to learn new things, Bick and others emphasize. It’s a matter of the return on the investment.
“Imagine you’re half a year before retirement,” he says. “Is it worth it to learn that technology?”
The impact of older workers leaving jobs sooner than expected could have consequences far beyond their own careers and financial security, analysts warn. AI is arriving in workplaces at precisely the moment when the economy needs people to stay in the workforce longer.
The proportion of American workers 55 and older has more than doubled in the past three decades, from 10 percent in 1994 to about 24 percent today, according to the Census Bureau. Meanwhile, thanks to falling birth rates, there are millions fewer younger people poised to enter the workforce than older people nearing retirement, projections from the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce show.
For these and other reasons, including financial need, nearly half of workers say they will stay on the job after turning 65, or have no plans to retire at all, a survey by the Transamerica Center for Retirement Studies finds.
AI could throw a wrench into those intentions, the Center for Retirement Research’s study suggests. “As many policy experts urge longer work lives, AI could be pushing some older workers in the opposite direction,” it says.
Room for a rebound
There are many caveats to these findings, researchers note.
Though it may already be a hot topic of conversation, AI as an everyday workplace or job search tool is still such a new technology that it’s uncertain whether the current employment trends will persist, researchers say. The technology could eventually free up older workers from mundane tasks and extend, rather than cut short, their careers.
This theory again cites the evidence from the arrival of personal computers into office spaces. While older workers were slower to take to PCs relative to their younger colleagues — lowering the wages for some older adults and hastening their exits from the workforce — that gap eventually closed, says Péter Hudomiet, a senior economist at the Rand Corp. and coauthor of a study about that period.
He also points out that “high-skilled people became more productive.” One way that happened was through older workers’ collaborations with younger coworkers — something Hudomiet says he saw himself among academics.
“Old professors didn’t know how to use computers, but they knew what the important research questions were,” so they teamed up with students who could apply the power of PCs.
Many older workers are, in fact, positioned to benefit from AI, according to another study of its impacts, from the Pension Research Council at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School — though even that review finds that they’re more vulnerable to rapid technological disruptions.
Under one scenario imagined by economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, the University of Pennsylvania, Stanford, the University of Virginia and Yale, AI could help extend the careers of older workers over the next 25 years by making it easier for them to work remotely.
But these experts, as well, predict a “significant” increase in departures from the labor force by older workers in the short term. Convincing more of them to stay could be one of the bigger challenges AI has to solve.
The key takeaways were created with the assistance of generative AI. An AARP editor reviewed and refined the content for accuracy and clarity.
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