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A little-noticed category in Friday's blockbuster jobs report is challenging the consensus view about job losses caused by artificial intelligence.
At least for now, the data suggests the U.S. is gaining jobs as a result of the AI boom, not losing them.
And another category suggests the strong jobs numbers could have some staying power.
Nonfarm payrolls grew by 165,000 jobs in October, according to the Friday report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. It was a surprising surge in hiring that blew way past Wall Street's expectations. Economists polled by Dow Jones had forecast growth of just 59,000 for the month.
Here are three surprising things you might have missed from the report.
Hiring for consultants surged in the month, sending the profession's total head count to a fresh record.
The labor force for management, scientific and technical consultants expanded by 17,300 jobs between September and October, the largest month-over-month increase in nearly two years. This category is a subset of the professional and business services sector tracked by BLS and accounted for 25% of the entire sector's gains for the month.
What's more, this workforce has grown by more than 45,000 jobs over the past year. That gain pushed the total employee base for these types of workers past 1.9 million for the first time on record, according to BLS data.
Hiring in the industry had largely stalled since 2023 following years of rapid expansion during the pandemic. Wall Street has questioned if the rise of artificial intelligence will curb demand for these services.
Those fears have led shares of consulting firm Gartner to lose more than half of their value over the past three years. Accenture and FTI Consulting have dropped about 18% and 9% over that period, even as the S&P 500 has climbed roughly 74%.
Now, some economists are speculating that the recent jump could be driven by businesses hiring consultants to help them adopt AI. Gartner forecast in September that worldwide AI spending would total $2.7 trillion in 2026, a nearly 50% increase year over year.
"The AI buildout and corporate interests to increase utilization will keep the technical consultants employed," said Jeffrey Roach, chief economist at LPL Financial.
Roach called the consulting sector a bright spot in October that is "worth watching." He noted that these jobs also saw double-digit growth in the late 1990s, as firms raced to implement new internet technology into their businesses.
So far, data suggests that AI may be adding more jobs to the labor market than it is taking away through automation. An assessment by Moody's Analytics found that AI has created a net 786,000 jobs since ChatGPT launched in November 2022, driven in part by data center construction.
"Wasn't AI supposed to destroy jobs? The most dystopian scenarios even called for mass unemployment," Mark Zandi, Moody's chief economist, wrote in a social media post on Monday. "That risk hasn't gone away, and AI-driven productivity gains could still shift into a higher gear. But for now, AI is adding to job growth, not subtracting from it."
Hiring of temporary workers also drove growth, which could signal that the labor market is heating up.
The subsector's payrolls grew by 18,600 in October, one of its largest month-over-month increases since 2022. This category is another part of the professional and business services sector and accounted for 27% of the sector's gains for the month.
The total size of this workforce is still well below record highs set in 2022. But headcount has grown roughly 3% since December and now sits at levels last seen in April 2025, the month that President Donald Trump's rollout of his plan for steep tariffs put corporate America on alert.
Economists see temporary hiring as a leading indicator in the labor market. Conventional wisdom suggests that companies that hire new workers on a short-term basis often transition them to full-time roles later.
That could be what's happening here, but the fact that the end of the year is approaching makes it harder to tell. The boost could be a result of hiring as the holiday shopping season approaches — and if employers are staffing up for the holidays, they are less likely to retain those workers when January rolls around. Such hiring hasn't typically happened this early, but the season creeps earlier each year. The BLS adjusts its numbers to account for seasonal trends, but won't immediately make an adjustment if the trend is changing.
One hint that holiday hiring may be shifting comes in a separate category of workers: couriers and messengers. This is another area that acts as a barometer for holiday labor demand, and just over one out of every 10 new jobs in the month was in this category.
That category "bears watching for reversal in the months ahead," said Jason Pride, chief of investment strategy and research at Glenmede, a wealth manager.
Hiring related to political campaigns in the final weeks of an expensive election cycle could have also boosted payrolls.
Employment in political organizations has historically spiked heading into midterm or presidential elections, according to a BLS analysis. Staffing levels tend to peak in October of those years, the data shows. Nonfarm payrolls expanded in the months before the 2018 and 2022 midterm elections.
But the vast size of campaign coffers this cycle may have translated into more jobs than before.
The 2026 congressional election is slated to go down in history as the most expensive midterm on record, according to an analysis from OpenSecrets, a money-in-politics watchdog group. Billions of dollars spent on campaigns may have translated into paid gigs that involve door knocking, phone banking or other election-related work.