The Federal Reserve Bank of New York is preparing to publish new data on generative AI’s reach inside the American workplace — and for a city whose economy runs on skilled labor, the findings carry real weight.
On April 14, 2026, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York will release a Liberty Street Economics blog post focused on generative AI usage in the workplace and the value that workers place on AI training, according to a media advisory issued by the institution on April 8. Authors of the research will host a deep background press call at 9:30 AM ET ahead of the 10:30 AM publication to provide further context to journalists.
The release lands at a moment when New York’s economy is being reorganized, in real time, around artificial intelligence. Whether measured in office leases signed or resumes submitted, the AI wave is no longer an abstraction for this city — it is already reshaping who gets hired, where companies set up shop, and what skills employers are willing to pay a premium for.
What the Research Is Expected to Cover
The New York Fed has been building toward this release through a series of related inquiries. In September 2025, the institution published an earlier Liberty Street Economics post on whether businesses in the New York–Northern New Jersey region were scaling back hiring due to AI. That research found that 40 percent of service firms in the region reported using AI as part of their business process — up from 25 percent the previous year — with 44 percent expecting to use AI over the next six months. Among manufacturers, the jump was similarly sized, rising from 16 percent to 26 percent.
The surveys also examined how firms were adjusting their workforces in response to AI — including layoffs, reduced hiring, securing AI-capable new employees, and retraining existing staff. The April 14 research is understood to go further, focusing specifically on how workers themselves value AI training — a dimension that employer-side surveys have not fully captured.
This worker-centered angle is significant. A Federal Reserve Bank of Boston analysis using the New York Fed’s own Survey of Consumer Expectations found that while widespread worry about AI-driven job loss had not yet materialized among workers surveyed at the end of 2024, roughly 21 percent of respondents expected that AI would cause their financial situation to worsen within one to five years. Workers who had actually used generative AI tools were notably more pessimistic about future inequality than those who had not.
Manhattan’s Office Market Is Already Pricing In the AI Boom
The research arrives as New York’s commercial real estate sector offers one of the clearest on-the-ground signals of the AI economy at work. Manhattan office leasing posted strong numbers in the first quarter of 2026, with AI firms doubling their leasing activity compared to the same period last year, taking 415,000 square feet — already half of their total for all of 2025.
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AI cloud platform Nscale Global Holdings set a new record for the highest office rent ever achieved in New York, signing at One Vanderbilt for $320 per square foot — the first time an AI company has held that distinction. The velocity of that expansion has strained available inventory, with brokers reporting that AI and AI-adjacent firms are touring and signing leases within days of initial inquiries.
These companies are not just filling space. They are competing for the same pool of technically skilled workers that every financial firm, law office, and media company in the city also needs. The New York Fed’s data on how workers value AI training speaks directly to that competition — and to whether New York’s workforce development infrastructure can keep pace.
What It Means for City Policy
The timing of the Fed’s research release intersects with a set of policy pressures that the Mamdani administration is actively navigating. The Center for an Urban Future, a New York City-focused think tank, published a report in February 2026 noting that advances in artificial intelligence are already reshaping the city’s economy, augmenting thousands of jobs while demonstrating growing potential to automate others. Administrative and back-office roles — which have long served as gateways into middle-wage work and been particularly important for women — are especially exposed.
Private-sector job creation in New York City fell sharply in 2025, down 71 percent compared to 2024, and unemployment began to tick back up across the city — marking the largest overall increase since May 2020. Against that backdrop, the report argues that workforce development should be treated as core infrastructure under the current administration, on par with housing and childcare.
On the state level, Governor Kathy Hochul has already moved in that direction. Hochul announced the expansion of AI education and training to the entire New York State government workforce, fulfilling a pledge made in her 2025 State of the State address aimed at ensuring over 100,000 state workers gain access to AI tools and instruction.
The Mamdani administration has focused its workforce investments elsewhere so far — most visibly through the expansion of the Next Mile NYC program to Rikers Island to connect justice-involved New Yorkers to careers in high-demand industries. That expansion launched in February 2026 at the Rose M. Singer Center, with additional sites planned, targeting an issue the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has identified as critical: formerly incarcerated people face unemployment rates more than 13 times the national average. AI-readiness training for the broader city workforce, however, has yet to emerge as a named mayoral priority.
The Data Catches Up to the City
The Federal Reserve Bank of New York occupies a unique position in this conversation. As both a regional economic institution with deep research capacity and a Lower Manhattan anchor with direct relationships across the finance and technology sectors, its findings on AI and workers carry institutional credibility that few other sources can match.
Survey data from mid-2025 found that 45.9 percent of workers reported using large language models at work — up from 30.1 percent in late 2024. Estimates suggest that 80 percent of U.S. workers are in occupations where at least 10 percent of their tasks could be affected by AI tools, and 18.5 percent of workers could have over half of their tasks impacted.
For New York City, those numbers translate into a workforce recalibration happening across every sector simultaneously. Finance, media, legal services, healthcare administration, and technology — all major employment pillars of the five boroughs — are at varying stages of integrating AI into daily work. What the New York Fed’s April 14 research is expected to add is something the existing data has largely been missing: a measure of how workers themselves are responding, what they think the training is worth, and whether they trust employers to deliver it.
That data point has direct implications for labor negotiations, workforce program design, and the fiscal projections that underpin the city’s budget — all of which are live pressure points for the administration heading into its second 100 days.
