Germany's labour minister says there will be no future jobs without AI, but worries about unemployment along the way

Germany's federal labour minister Alexander Schweitzer said there will be "no jobs of the future without AI", while warning that the shift must not leave people out of work in between, heise online reported from the federal government's Digital Summit in Berlin on 3 November 2026. "What concerns me is making sure the transformation doesn't involve a period of unemployment along the way," the SPD minister said. On the same panel, Enzo Weber of the Institute for Employment Research (IAB), the Federal Employment Agency's research institute, argued that the loss of low-skilled jobs should not be treated as a crisis, because "people don't need the jobs of the past 10 years, but the jobs of the next 10 years". Digital minister Karsten Wildberger (CDU) said "of course, we have to transform legacy companies", pointing to AI-driven assortment planning in retail as a source of profit. The speakers are the ministers responsible for Germany's labour market and its digital policy, and the government's own labour-market researcher. heise notes that companies often cite AI to justify job cuts; none was named at the session. This summary uses heise's report of the panel; no transcript was read.