What happened
Apollo Global Management's chief economist team published research this week putting a dollar figure on AI's labor-market footprint: roughly $28 billion in annual wage suppression across the US workforce, per a summary carried by CryptoBriefing on Friday. The note reframes the AI-and-jobs debate that has run since ChatGPT's late-2022 launch. Apollo's argument is not that AI is firing people. It is that AI is quietly changing the price of their work.
The research points to sectors where generative tools have compressed the time needed to draft, code, summarize, or triage. In those roles, Apollo argues, employers are absorbing the productivity gain rather than passing it through as raises. Headcount holds. Pay growth slows. The $28 billion figure is Apollo's estimate of the annual gap between what wages would have been under prior productivity-to-pay pass-through and what they actually are.
The firm did not publish a full public methodology in the client-facing note flagged by CryptoBriefing, and the $28 billion number should be read as an internal estimate rather than a Bureau of Labor Statistics print.
Why it matters
For crypto, the read-through runs through the Federal Reserve. Wage growth is the stickiest input in the services-inflation basket that Chair Jerome Powell has cited repeatedly as the last mile of the disinflation fight. If Apollo is directionally right and AI is quietly capping pay, that removes a wage-price spiral risk the Fed has been pricing since 2022. Softer wage prints are a rate-cut tailwind. Rate-cut tailwinds have been the dominant bid under bitcoin and the broader risk complex through 2025 and into 2026.
There is a second channel that matters more for on-chain flows than for spot ETFs. Apollo flags that AI is also collapsing the cost of starting a company. Solo founders can now ship what took a 10-person team in 2021. That lowers the capital needed to launch, and it overlaps directly with the crypto-native infrastructure stack: wallets-as-a-service, agent frameworks, permissionless payment rails, on-chain identity. A builder cycle powered by cheap AI tooling is the same builder cycle that historically fills block space.