“Hiring was more broad-based in May than we’ve seen in the last few years,” ADP chief economist Nela Richardson said as eight of the 10 sectors gained. 

That data follows Tuesdays’ JOLTS release in what is becoming a stronger-than-expected “Jobs Week.” Job openings climbed to 7.6 million in April, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Tuesday, up more than 730,000 from an upwardly revised 6.9 million in March and the highest in nearly two years.

Taken together, the week’s data so far— the official jobs data comes out Friday—describes a labor market that has stopped sliding, even as inflation worsens. However, this  could put new Fed chair Kevin Warsh, who is loath to raise interest rates, in a sticky situation.

“If there was downside momentum for much of 2025, it seems to have stabilized, and there’s some prospect for a pickup in job growth this year,” Skanda Amarnath, executive director of Employ America (an org founded in 2019 to combat the policy failures that led to the Global Financial Crisis), told Fortune. The signals, he said, point to a market that has settled at “a growth rate that’s not recessionary.”

An easy explanation, with an AI capex boom roaring in the background, is that artificial intelligence is somehow behind the firming, or will soon come to take it all away. Amarnath doesn’t buy it—in either direction.

“I don’t think it’s obvious what the AI explanation for some of this is,” he said.

The pickup, he said, is mostly two forces that have nothing to do with AI. The first is years of suppressed hiring finally reversing: companies over-hired coming out of the pandemic, spent 2022 through 2025 reversing course and bracing for a recession, and now need to hire again. “The more you hold back on hiring, and the more you still have productive work that needs to be done, you eventually have to bring that back,” he said. “Or else you’ll be a less competitive firm.” 

The second is immigration: with the Trump administration’s deportation scheme rippling through the economy in 2025, now that effect has started to wind down. “Immigration is no longer such a headwind for job growth,” he said.

There is one place that looks like a clean AI story. Information, which ADP classifies as software publishing, data processing, and telecommunications, shed 9,000 jobs in May, the steepest decline of any industry in ADP’s count, and the workers who kept those jobs got the slowest raises in the economy, 4.0%. 

Amarnath waved off AI displacement fears. Information is dominated by media and publishing, not tech, he said: “A very bad categorization” for reading anything about AI into. And the genuinely tech-heavy corners don’t fit the displacement story either: job openings there have actually ticked up after a long decline.

What the data does show is a market that is steadying in a familiar, frozen way. Beneath April’s openings jump, hires actually fell, to 5.1 million, and quits were essentially flat—the low-hire, low-fire pattern that defined all of last year. 

It is “still there,” Amarnath said, “but it’s not getting any worse.” The openings surge was also lopsided: by Indeed Hiring Lab’s reading, postings at the very largest employers are more than 80% above pre-pandemic levels, while the smaller firms that account for the majority of openings stayed soft. ADP, oddly, has the reverse, with the small firms doing the actual hiring—companies with fewer than 50 employees added 67,000 of May’s 122,000.

The pay data tells the same cooling-but-stable story. Job-stayers saw annual pay rise 4.4%, unchanged from April, while the premium for job-switchers narrowed to 6.5% from 6.6%, which means workers are prioritizing security over the gamble of switching.

The problem with a stabilizing labor market is that the central bank has been leaning towards the other direction all year. The Fed meets June 16–17, and markets are pricing near-certainty of a hold at 3.5% to 3.75%, even as inflation roils the economy. 

Amarnath thinks the more interesting question is what comes next. The Fed will drop its easing bias first, he said; he expects some officials to dissent in June in favor of a tightening bias, and for the projections, if published, to start leaning that way. 

“By July, if inflation hasn’t shown improvement, it’s going to be hard not to have a tightening-bias statement,” he said. And if inflation stays firm, “you could very easily be there for a hike by September, October, or December.”