TL;DR:

• Former UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak — now an adviser to Anthropic, Microsoft and Goldman Sachs — has told the BBC that AI is already flattening hiring for young people and proposed abolishing National Insurance “over time” to rebalance the tax system.
• Sunak says company chief executives privately tell him “flat is the new up” — growth without headcount — driven by AI deployment, particularly in law, accountancy and creative roles.
• The pitch lands alongside the FT-Focaldata AI adoption divide data published the same day and an AWS UK enterprise-adoption study, forming a consistent early evidence base that UK labour-market policy is being asked to respond to, not lead.

Former UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has told the BBC that AI is already reducing the number of jobs available to young people, and that governments should respond by abolishing National Insurance over time, replacing it with taxes on corporate profits boosted by AI-driven productivity. Sunak, now an adviser to Anthropic and Microsoft and a senior adviser at Goldman Sachs, said the concerns of graduates looking for entry-level jobs are “justified”.

What Sunak actually said

Sunak told BBC Newsnight that company bosses privately acknowledge that graduate recruitment is flattening because of AI, and described a concept he attributed to CEOs: “flat is the new up” — businesses growing without significant increases in employment. He said the effect is most pronounced in service sectors including law, accountancy and the creative industries. His tax-reform pitch is that AI productivity gains should move the burden from labour taxes to corporate-profit taxes. He also argued AI’s employment impact “may be different to previous technology cycles”.

Why this matters beyond the headline

The timing compounds two other same-day datapoints. The FT-Focaldata poll of 4,000 US and UK workers, published this morning, shows that more than 60 per cent of the highest-paid workers use AI daily compared with 16 per cent of the lowest earners, and that AI-driven workplace inequality is widening — not closing. AWS UK enterprise research, also published this week, found only 24 per cent of UK organisations have moved AI beyond basic use cases and flagged a 49 per cent skills-shortage figure. The combined picture — fewer junior roles, uneven adoption, concentrated skills benefit — is a specific UK labour-market shape, not a speculative future.

Sunak’s credibility on this is double-edged. He set up the UK’s AI Safety Summit in 2023 and created the body that is now the AI Security Institute; he is also, as he disclosed, an adviser to two of the three firms most directly implicated in AI-driven labour-market change.

Looking forward

The more interesting policy question Sunak raised is not NI abolition — the current Chancellor is unlikely to engage on that — but whether the UK needs a dedicated response to AI-driven junior-role compression. The Department for Work and Pensions published a quiet consultation this month on AI labour-market monitoring that has drawn limited attention. Expect that file to become more politically active as the AWS, FT-Focaldata and AISI data accumulate. The absence of Lammy’s Labour frontbench from today’s BBC segment is its own signal.