The tech industry’s promise of an AI-driven economic future depends on automating jobs and displacing workers while strengthening its own power. In a speculative race to build an “AI first” economy, corporate spending on AI is climbing to new heights. While policymakers are anticipating a future of mass job displacement and large corporations continue to accumulate power, workers face an ever more hostile political environment. Recent policymaking has centered anti-worker policies, hollowing out standard labor rights and protections and effectively re-writing the social contract for workers. At the same time, private companies are building out AI technologies in ways that further entrench inequalities in the US and globally.

But the bleakness of this vision is not a foregone conclusion. To build a different future requires us to understand and change the structures of power, control, and ideology behind AI adoption in the workplace. In this primer, Alexandra Mateescu, Aiha Nguyen, and Sanjay Pinto offer a framework for the institutional, political, and economic shifts that underpin AI adoption. They argue that the sprint to create the so-called AI-first economy must be understood not as the logical march of progress, but as a series of deliberate economic decisions that risk harming entire populations of workers in ways both old and new. Building a worker-driven future — one in which AI is subject to democratic oversight — will require rigorous, timely analysis of how workers are experiencing AI’s impact to support organizing, bargaining, and policy work.

Suggested citation: Alexandra Mateescu, Aiha Nguyen, and Sanjay Pinto, Last Place in the AI-First Economy: How the AI Industry Relies on Worker Disempowerment, Data & Society, March 2026, https://doi.org/10.69985/FDQO6355.

We extend our deepest gratitude to our funders, whose generous support and unwavering commitment made this research possible. This primer was produced, in part, with support from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation and the Ford Foundation. Alexandra Mateescu is a 2024-2026 Siegel Research Fellow.