'Was advent of Microsoft Office substitute for office workers?' Citadel Securities trashes Citrini's dystopian AI report

Citadel Securities in its report says that present official data across sectors show a very little impact of AI-driven labour disruption

• Citadel Securities disputes Citrini's 2028 AI job loss scenario
• Flight says tech change usually boosts, not disrupts, economies
• Recent data shows no broad AI-driven job losses so far

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Days after the 2028 "scenario" report by Citrini Research rattled markets and triggered a panic sell-off, experts have continued to question its dystopian projections. The latest to push back is Citadel Securities.

In a strongly worded note, Citadel's macro strategist Frank Flight argued that the Citrini report should not be taken at face value. Citing historical precedent, Flight said past waves of technological advancement have generally strengthened economies and societies rather than caused widespread, lasting disruption.

"Successive waves of technological change have not produced runaway exponential growth, nor have they rendered labour obsolete," Flight wrote.

Challenging Citrini's forecast of large-scale white-collar job losses in the near future, Flight pointed to recent data from the Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis and other labour market indicators. He said there is little evidence so far of broad AI-driven displacement.

In fact, he noted that software engineering - a profession often cited as vulnerable to automation - has seen a rise in job postings in recent months. Construction hiring has also increased, supported by a global boom in AI-related data centre projects.

The debate intensified after Citrini Research outlined a hypothetical 2028 scenario in which rapid advances in artificial intelligence dramatically boost productivity while severely disrupting multiple industries and displacing significant numbers of white-collar workers. The report contributed to a sharp sell-off in technology stocks on Monday and sparked heated discussions among investors and policymakers, with a senior economist at the White House dismissing it as "science fiction."

Flight argued that technological change typically follows an S-curve pattern: adoption begins slowly, accelerates as costs decline, and eventually levels off as markets approach saturation. As diffusion slows, the risk of abrupt labour displacement also diminishes, he said.

Rather than replacing human workers outright, AI is more likely to complement labour in many sectors, similar to previous technological revolutions. "To frame this debate correctly, one can simply ask: was the advent of Microsoft Office a complement or a substitute for office workers?" Flight wrote in his note published Tuesday.

Citrini founder James van Geelen has described the 2028 outlook as a hypothetical scenario, not a formal prediction.

Flight added that even if such a scenario were to materialise, policymakers and governments would not remain idle. Regulatory measures and fiscal stimulus would likely be deployed to cushion any widespread layoffs, which in turn would slow the pace of labour substitution.

"For AI to produce a sustained negative demand shock, the economy must see a material acceleration in adoption, experience near-total labour substitution, no fiscal response, negligible investment absorption, and unconstrained scaling of compute," he wrote.