U.S. private employers added 122,000 jobs in May, ADP reported, beating expectations and marking the strongest hiring month in over a year, while job openings climbed to a near-two-year high of 7.6 million. Economists pushed back on reading AI into the numbers in either direction, with Employ America's Skanda Amarnath attributing the pickup mainly to suppressed pandemic-era hiring finally reversing and immigration pressures easing, not AI. The one apparent AI story, a 9,000-job drop in the “information” sector, is misleading, he argued, since that category is dominated by media and publishing rather than tech, and genuinely tech-heavy job openings have actually ticked up. The firming labor market, paired with worsening inflation, could complicate matters for the Fed, which meets June 16-17 and may shift toward a tightening bias.
