Anxieties about artificial intelligence and the job market appeared surprisingly muted at the Central Oregon Community College job fair this term. Many students and employers expressed optimism rooted in the belief that face-to-face interaction will remain an irreplaceable skill. Yet while fears about unemployment are supported by mounting evidence, a deeper and potentially more intractable issue may define an AI-driven future: economic inequality.
As I entered the job fair, I was dealing with anxieties of my own. This was my first reporting assignment, and I had no idea where to begin. The first thing I noticed was a news camera mounted on a tripod. Before I could gather myself, a more experienced journalist introduced herself as Beatrice Byrd, a reporter with Central Oregon Daily, and asked to interview me. Beat to the scoop, I agreed to answer her questions. Afterwards, I meekly insisted we trade interviews as mutual compensation. She kindly agreed.
A year removed from graduating from the University of Oregon, Byrd described the job search as intimidating, particularly when navigating online applications and digital networking.
“It felt scary. There were not a lot of responses. Luckily, when I found this job it was through a personal connection. It felt so different from an online application,” Byrd said, introducing what would become a recurring theme throughout the fair: community and personal relationships.
Still, the broader direction of the economy appears less reassuring. Media, like many industries, is increasingly consolidated into a shrinking pool of ownership, while the outlook for stable employment continues to deteriorate. The Washington Post, owned by Jeff Bezos, reportedly laid off roughly 30% of its staff in February.
The Post is hardly an outlier. A small group of billionaires and conglomerates now dominates the American media landscape. In 1983, 50 companies controlled 90% of U.S. media. By 2011, that number had shrunk to six major corporations. Recent consolidation has accelerated even further in the last year, driven by deregulation, streaming economics, and the race to acquire AI-ready assets. According to Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, more than half of all visits to major U.S. news sites between December 2024 and November 2025 went to outlets controlled by just seven families or corporate entities.
Byrd expressed confidence that despite an AI-driven future, reporting still depends on fundamentally human qualities.
“Certain things AI can’t replicate, and that’s what feels most personal to people. Emotional stories, funny stories, exciting stories,” she said.
That confidence felt persuasive. While generative AI can already produce complete news articles, much of today’s AI-generated content resembles “slop” — low-quality material that clutters information ecosystems rather than replacing meaningful journalism outright. Human connection still matters.
At another booth, Cassandra Hunter from Travel and Leisure, one of the world’s largest vacation agencies, emphasized the same point.
“We want that human emotion during an interview. So much of what we do is face-to-face,” she said.
AI will not reduce the company’s staffing needs, she said.
“Not us. Whether you’re on the resort side checking people in or working as a sales rep, it’s all face-to-face interaction. You have to like people. No technology can take that away.”
Still, Hunter acknowledged that AI is playing a growing role higher up the corporate ladder.
“I’m sure they use a lot more automation with AI, but where we are, we bring in new levels of income to allow the company to grow. We couldn’t do that without face-to-face interaction.”
Her colleague, Koby Owen, summarized it more simply: “At the bottom of the company, we are the face of the company.”
The protection offered by interpersonal work was evident throughout the fair. Many employers repeated the same idea: jobs centered on hospitality, service, and direct human interaction appear relatively insulated from automation, at least for now.
The more difficult question is whether those jobs provide a reliable bridge into the middle class. Hunter argued that Travel and Leisure’s hourly-plus-commission structure made it a stronger alternative to traditional entry-level service work at places like Starbucks, with more opportunity for promotion and greater quality of life.
Current trends suggest AI may contribute to an increasingly “hourglass-shaped” economy, where high-paying senior roles and low-paying service work expand while middle-tier white-collar positions disappear. Entry-level office jobs — administrative assistants, analysts, coordinators, and other routine cognitive roles — are among the most vulnerable to automation. Senior positions remain more protected because they rely on experience, judgment, and social trust. At the same time, those higher-level positions are also more likely to benefit from AI driven productivity gains.
The jobs least likely to be automated — physical labor and service-sector work — are also among the least likely to experience major wage growth due to a lack of labor protections.
At Brasada Ranch, representatives Gray Goeberbetting and Jess Carrington, hiring for roles ranging from lifeguards to groundskeepers, echoed the same confidence in the value of human interaction.
“AI is helping us automate our systems, but hospitality is by nature a people business,” Carrington said. “Especially in a place like Bend, where tourism is such a cornerstone of the community, I don’t think students have a lot to worry about if they’re going into hospitality.”
Goeberbetting argued that this demand for connection reflects a broader shift in consumer behavior within the luxury economy.
“When you look at the luxury sector, people are increasingly paying for connection,” he said. “In hospitality, people are part of the product.”
He also offered a more pragmatic approach to resilience in the AI era. Rather than resisting the technology outright, he suggested workers learn to integrate it strategically.
“Total resistance to it isn’t going to serve anyone well across industries,” he said. “I use AI for spreadsheets, and it can save me 30 to 45 minutes a day. That gives me more time to be with my team. To be resilient is to understand it well enough to free up your time and develop your soft skills instead of getting buried in busy work.”
AI may indeed make many workers more efficient, freeing time for more meaningful tasks. But historically, the benefits of technological revolutions have flowed disproportionately toward ownership rather than labor. According to the Economic Policy Institute, from 1979 to 2024 worker productivity increased by roughly 80.9%, while average hourly compensation rose only 29.4%. Workers generated more value year after year, but much of the gain accumulated elsewhere.
My concern is that the future economy may increasingly support only two kinds of jobs: those that create wealth and those that service it. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, roughly 80% of the U.S. private-sector workforce is now employed in the service economy, a reality reflected clearly at the job fair. While service work can provide valuable entry-level opportunities, it often lacks the stability and bargaining power that manufacturing jobs historically provided through unions.
Corporate priorities also reveal where economic gains are likely to flow. Although companies have traditionally directed large portions of profits toward stock buybacks, investment is increasingly shifting toward AI infrastructure and automation. In many cases this is advertised in the marketing of the product. Meanwhile, wage growth for most workers has remained relatively stagnant. Because the top 10% of Americans own the overwhelming majority of stocks, the gains produced by AI-driven productivity are likely to accrue primarily to wealthier households, potentially widening inequality even if the overall economy grows.
A different concern surfaces repeatedly in conversations about students: dependence on AI itself. The MIT Media Lab study reported that “excessive reliance on AI-driven solutions” may contribute to “cognitive atrophy” and a shrinking of critical thinking abilities. There was no evidence to support this at the job fair, however, many students I talked to cited AI as a useful tool.
Andres Alvarada, an art and design major, said he uses AI only in limited ways. While he acknowledged that AI can already produce competitive 2D artwork, he was more skeptical about its ability to quickly replace work in his field of interest: 3D modeling.
Computer graphic artists experienced a 33% decline in job postings in 2025 — the steepest drop of any creative role analyzed. According to the World Economic Forum, graphic design jobs will be one of the fastest declining roles by 2030.
To remain resilient, Alvarada emphasized the need to, “Educate yourself about it so you know which path to pursue.”
Alvarada said he was at the job fair to find an entry-level job. “I quit Starbucks a few years ago, and I need the money.”
At WorkSource, a community organization that helps connect people with employment, Kari Tsourmas agreed that concerns about the future job market are legitimate.
“Our organization knows it’s coming,” she said of AI. “We’re currently creating a training program around AI that can help job seekers use it as an asset.” This is consistent with a common belief that AI could prove helpful to people entering the workforce if educated on the tool.
Malakai Miller, an English literature student pursuing humanitarian social work, brought a more critical perspective.
“I wrote a paper about how bad the job market is because companies see layoffs as a way to save money,” he said. “They see profits go up and think, ‘Whoo!’ But I think eventually that’s going to backfire.”
On AI itself, Miller was ambivalent.
“It feels corporate, hyper-sanitized and lacks humanity. Honestly, you can usually tell it’s AI because it would never curse or actually be funny.”
Miller’s own work experience reinforced the central lesson repeated throughout the fair: personal connection still matters.
“The only job I’ve had was because the manager was my neighbor and liked how I work,” he said.
As I left my first ever reporting assignment, I struggled to maintain an unbiased approach to what I had heard. It struck me that concerns about unemployment may be missing the deeper problem. The entry-level jobs most protected from automation — service work, hospitality, face-to-face sales — are precisely the ones least likely to build a secure path into the middle class, which is what college used to assure.
The race to acquire AI assets among corporations is accelerating a winner-take-all economy, with mid-level white-collar work bearing the heaviest losses. The people trying to find their footing are being squeezed from both ends — automated out of the jobs that used to build careers, and locked out of the gains from the technology doing the automating.
As AI reshapes the labor market, collective action may become increasingly important in determining whether the benefits of new technology are shared or concentrated among a small ownership class. The strongest defense against these economic pressures may have to go beyond employment and toward political organizing and broader economic transformation in order to prove resilient. The personal relationships emphasized throughout the job fair may ultimately matter less as a hiring advantage but rather because solidarity is the social infrastructure from which any push for structural reform would have to grow.
