The new working model during the AI transition: Freelancing

Phase 1: A lifetime at one employer, climbing a single corporate ladder

For most of the last century the default was to stay with one employer and climb the company ranks. The career was a ladder inside a single organisation, and the reward for loyalty was seniority: a better title, more responsibility, and a comfortable pension at the end of it.

Stability and predictability mattered far more then than now, at a time when the available job options were more limited. Information travelled slowly, hiring was local, and a steady position with a known employer was something to hold on to, rather than to trade up from.

Phase 2: Switching employers becomes easier, and more frequent

Globalisation opened hiring across borders. More recently, since the ‘dot-com’ boom in the early 2000s, the online job boards like LinkedIn further fuelled this new trend of frequently switching employers.

Over time, job-boards’ algorithms got increasingly more sophisticated, and employees could now receive personalized job recommendations, and apply with just a few clicks. This greatly reduced the friction of job searching, and the frequency of switching jobs grew, holding all else constant. The data shows that at any given age under fifty, people now hold a job for less time than their parents did. Also, in America, the ten-year or twenty-year career at a single company, once ordinary, has become the exception.

Phase 3: A growing share of skilled workers choose to work independently, as a freelancer.

In the past ~15 years, a new paradigm has emerged in the job market, which has accelerated even further due to the rapid growth of artificial intelligence: freelancing is becoming mainstream, and replacing full-time employment. Across Europe even though the total number of solo self-employed is shrinking, the skilled solo self-employed grew ~27% since 2011. Professionals on their own account grew fastest of all, up about 43%, and now make up half of Europe’s solo self-employed, up from about a third in 2011.

The previous section described the three phases that have shaped the labour market since the 20th century. The question that matters for the next decade is why the shift toward independent work should continue, and possibly accelerate further.

I see two “forces” driving the growth in freelancing, and they sit on opposite sides of the job market:

1. On the demand side, AI is reshaping the talent companies need, with the demand for AI-related skills surging and changing constantly. This constant need for new skills is creating a growing demand for skilled freelancers who can quickly fill the gap, and help companies navigate the AI transition.
2. On the supply side, there is a growing preference for independent work, fuelled by demographic shifts and changing career aspirations (e.g. work-life balance, desire for working remotely, independence). The data shows that this trend is especially prominent since 2025, when LLMs reached a level of ‘intelligence’ that enabled them to be used for a wide range of tasks.

To recap, I set out to explain one shift and why it should last: freelancing is becoming mainstream, and is expected to keep growing through the AI transition. The labour market reached this point in three phases: a lifetime at one employer, then decades of switching jobs more and more often, and now a growing share of skilled people working for themselves.

The question for the next decade is why this should continue, and possibly accelerate. To answer it, I pointed to two forces that sit on opposite sides of the job market:

1. Demand. AI keeps reshaping the skills companies need, and it does so constantly, as every few months a new model resets what the technology can do. The skills gap is large and needs to be filled: 86% of employers call AI the single biggest force reshaping their business and expect about 39% of core skills to change by 2030. Despite that, only one EU firm in five was using any AI by 2025, and when asked why not, 70% of them said it was because they lacked in-house expertise. Since workers who use AI deliver 15% to 40% more on the tasks measured, bringing in a flexible, AI-skilled freelancer for a few weeks or months lets a company adapt and lower its risk while the skills it needs keep shifting.
2. Supply. The wish to work independently is old and stable, driven by the desire for autonomy rather than pay, and it runs strongest among the younger age groups. What is new is that people are now acting on it, and that doing so now feels safe: the share of independents who feel more secure on their own than in a traditional job has doubled, from 32% to 67%. The behaviour follows the mood, with 690,000 new founders in Germany in 2025, up 18% in a single year, and an all-time record for new business applications in the United States.

Taken together, the two forces fit each other. The demand side is looking for precisely the flexible, up-to-date skill that the supply side is increasingly willing to offer.

In fact, we are still early in this transition phase. Most of the demand described here has not arrived yet, as the data shows that only one in five EU firms were using any AI as of 2025. Similarly, on the supply side confidence and founder counts are still rising rather than peaking, and AI adoption is growing across domains.

However, what remains unclear is whether the structural shift we are seeing in the labour market will be permanent once the AI transition phase is over, and we reach a new steady-state, or whether the growth of freelancing is a temporary phenomenon that will eventually revert to the old status quo. The answer to this question will depend on how the labour market evolves in the coming years, and whether the forces driving the shift towards freelancing continue to strengthen or weaken over time.