AI isn’t shrinking work. It’s changing who does it and how

I was recently asked whether AI is creating an economy that can grow without needing more workers. They wanted to know, “Should we be worried about this?”

The timing wasn’t lost on me. Some of the world’s most powerful tech leaders are currently sounding the alarm on the very advancements they created.

Made by Arsal Ysfin / Tech in Asia with the help of AI

I have my own concerns. As a father, I find myself thinking about my children and what the world of work will be like when they enter it. As the CEO of Aspire, a Singapore-based finance platform for global businesses, I have a good grasp of how thousands of businesses spend, hire, and grow.

We can’t afford to fall behind competitors that have embraced AI, so I’m actively pushing the tech into our operations and products. We have to deal with the changes in front of us, so we’re using AI where we can and must and doing so as responsibly as possible.

However, one part of the AI-and-jobs debate deserves more attention. Through Aspire’s work with clients and our own experience adopting AI, we’re seeing something bigger than a shift in how work gets done.

The debate assumes AI shrinks the amount of work to go around, but our data shows something else is happening. For one, work is being reorganized into smaller core groups. There are also more freelancers and first-time founders, and the appetite to build is growing faster than the headcount needed to do it.

The workforce has already adapted

Analysis of anonymized transaction data from more than 10,000 businesses on Aspire across 2025 and 2026 reveals plenty about how companies are restructuring: fewer full-time hires, more flexible talent, and more founders starting out.

Today, one in five startups pay staff on an ad hoc basis, up almost 7 percentage points in a year. This points to a growing freelancer and contractor layer beneath traditional full-time headcount.

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From my conversations with other founders, it’s clear that companies are already being structured differently, with smaller core teams, specialist talent brought in as needed, and increasingly capable AI systems working alongside them.

Interestingly, this shift toward leaner business structures isn’t confined to emerging industries. In more traditional sectors like management consulting, businesses with 10 or fewer employees are twice as prevalent as larger firms within our new customer mix.

But smaller teams don’t necessarily mean fewer opportunities. If anything, AI is fueling a new wave of entrepreneurship by lowering the costs of starting a company and changing what it takes to scale one.

Over the past year, 94% of newly incorporated businesses on our platform had 10 or fewer employees, and one in three of these companies had a solo founder.

What our own AI experience tells us