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We document rapid currents: most employers in exposed occupations have adopted chatbot initiatives, workers report productivity benefits, and new AI-related tasks are widespread. Yet these currents have not broken the surface: using difference-indifferences, we estimate precise null effects on earnings and recorded hours at both the worker and workplace levels, ruling out effects larger than 2% two years after the launch of ChatGPT. What moves is the structure of work: employers absorb AI through task reorganization—including new tasks in content generation, AI oversight, and AI integration—and adopters transition into higher-paying occupations where AI chatbots are more relevant, though still too few to move average earnings. Technological change reshapes work well before it surfaces in earnings or hours. Acknowledgements and Disclosures This paper was previously circulated under the title “Large Language Models, Small Labor Market Effects.” We thank David Autor, Marianne Bertrand, Jacob Conway, Matthew Notowidigdo, Lindsey Raymond (discussant), Chad Syverson, and seminar participants at the 2025 NBER SI: Digital Economics and Artificial Intelligence, the 2025 SED Meeting: Automation, the Becker Friedman Institute, UC Berkeley, Boston College, Chicago Booth, the Chicago Fed, ETUI, Northwestern Kellogg, OpenAI Economic Research Conference, INSEAD, Microsoft Research, and MIT Sloan FutureTech for helpful comments and suggestions. This project received financial support from the Center for Applied Artificial Intelligence and the Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation. Caspar Ringhof and Claude Code (Opus 4.6) provided excellent research assistance. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. Citation and Citation Data Copy Citation Anders Humlum and Emilie Vestergaard, "Still Waters, Rapid Currents: Early Labor Market Transformation under Generative AI," NBER Working Paper 33777 (2025), https://doi.org/10.3386/w33777. Copy to Clipboard Download Citation MARC RIS BibTeΧ Download Citation Data Other Versions May 9, 2025 October 20, 2025 Related Topics Labor Economics Labor Supply and Demand Labor Compensation Development and Growth Innovation and R&D Programs Labor Studies Productivity, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship Conferences SI 2025 Digital Economics and Artificial Intelligence Mentioned in the News AI Hype Is Proving to Be a Solow's Paradox - Bloomberg June 25, 2025 Source: Bloomberg Read the research here . 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