Half of Americans fear AI could cost someone their job

AI is no longer a distant management talking point for Big Lots workers. It is a fear test, and the latest Reuters-Ipsos poll showed how sharp that anxiety has become: 53% of Americans worried AI could put them or someone in their household out of work, while only 37% said they were not worried at all.

The six-day survey, run June 3-8 with Ipsos’s probability-based KnowledgePanel, reached 4,531 U.S. adults age 18 or older and carried a margin of error of 2 percentage points. Reuters said the concern was spread fairly evenly across age, gender and education groups, though the usage gap was notable: 50% of college graduates said they used AI regularly, compared with 34% of people without degrees and 40% overall. Democrats were more uneasy than Republicans, with 61% saying they worried AI could come for jobs in their household, compared with 47% of Republicans.

That split matters in retail because workers do not experience AI as a boardroom slogan. They see it in the places that shape a shift: schedules that get changed faster, inventory systems that predict demand, handheld tools that flag errors, checkout systems that change the pace at the front end, and customer-service tools that decide what help reaches the floor. The question for Big Lots is not whether technology will spread through those tasks. It is whether the company trains people well enough that the tools feel like support instead of replacement.

Reuters linked the anxiety to job cuts at large employers, including Intuit, which said last month it would lay off 17% of its global workforce as it sharpened its focus on AI efforts. Ipsos’s broader 2026 AI Monitor also showed the other side of the story: two-thirds of workers across 32 countries said AI had saved them time at work in the last 12 months. That is the tension retail workers recognize. A machine can save time and still make the person using it wonder whether the next step is being automated away.

Big Lots enters that debate with more baggage than most chains. Its jobs page says the company has store support centers in Columbus, Ohio, and Henderson, North Carolina, and opportunities in more than 220 stores across 17 states. Its bankruptcy case background says Former BL Stores, Inc. and subsidiaries initiated Chapter 11 proceedings on September 9, 2024, and Newsweek later reported the chain planned nearly 300 additional store closures in 2025. In that setting, any AI rollout will land inside a workforce already watching for signs that efficiency is being used to shrink labor rather than strengthen stores.