U.S. jobs growth stays resilient as AI reshapes hiring demand

The labor market is still adding jobs at a pace that should make hiring managers pause before calling it a slowdown. U.S. nonfarm payrolls rose by 172,000 in May, unemployment held at 4.3%, and average hourly earnings increased 0.3% on the month and 3.4% from a year earlier, a sign that wage pressure is still alive even as headline hiring remains steady.

The gains were concentrated in leisure and hospitality, local government and health care, while financial activities slipped. Revisions to March and April payrolls were also pushed higher, reinforcing the picture of a market that is resilient rather than rolling over. For monday.com employees in engineering, product and sales, that matters because a still-tight labor market keeps competition for talent real, even if employers are no longer hiring as aggressively as they did at peak demand.

What is changing is the way companies justify each hire. S&P Global’s AI and labor landscape report found that process efficiency, cited by 64% of respondents, and employee productivity, at 59%, were more common AI goals than head-count reduction, at 24%. Only 22% of AI projects are aimed at a fully autonomous end state. The report also found an average current adoption rate of 50% across 38 AI use cases, while the average planned adoption rate over the next year was 37%, a gap that suggests many companies are still figuring out where AI actually belongs in the workflow.

For monday.com, that is not an abstract macro story. On May 11, 2026, the company said first-quarter revenue reached $351.3 million, up 24% year over year, and it launched an AI Work Platform with native agents. Co-CEOs Roy Mann and Eran Zinman tied that launch, along with the shift to consumption-based pricing, directly to AI taking on more work for customers. In practice, that means product teams will face pressure to ship AI features that do more than sound impressive, and sales teams will need clearer proof that those features drive measurable returns.

The company also said it ended the quarter with 3,211 employees, 56 more than the prior quarter, and management said staffing should remain largely stable for the rest of 2026 because AI is improving productivity. monday.com repurchased $553 million of stock in the quarter and said about $182 million remained under its authorization. More than 250,000 customers now use the platform, which means the AI pitch is no longer just about product differentiation. It is also becoming part of how monday.com explains hiring discipline, operating leverage and the next stage of growth.