Forrester: US Customer-Service Job Postings Are Already 10% Below Pre-Pandemic — Before Anyone Called It an AI Layoff

US customer-service job postings are running roughly 10% below pre-pandemic levels even as overall US job postings sit above that baseline — a gap Forrester analysts Kate Leggett and Michael O’Grady say reflects structural under-hiring in the function specifically, not a general labor slowdown. Their two new reports, built on O*NET, Bureau of Labor Statistics, and Indeed Hiring Lab data, add that customer-service salary growth has been flat since May 2025 and that companies are increasingly hiring technologists to automate service work rather than adding reps. Forrester’s forecast: 38% of US jobs lost to generative AI by 2030 will come from office and administrative support occupations, the category that includes customer service. The caveat is real — regulated, high-liability, or exception-heavy workflows will resist automation longer, and AI decouples inquiry volume from headcount rather than shrinking the workforce uniformly, with remaining reps facing higher bars for complex case handling and AI oversight.

That contraction is happening quietly, without a press release calling it a layoff — which makes it useful context for PwC’s July 15 launch of agentic contact and service solutions built on OpenAI’s APIs, sold on the promise of freeing human staff “to focus on interactions requiring judgment, empathy, and trust.” Forrester’s data says that reallocation is already underway and has been since before PwC’s launch: the jobs disappearing aren’t primarily the empathy-heavy escalations, they’re the routine-inquiry roles that used to be the training ground reps grew into senior positions from.

The Ceiling Method read: this is the customer-service function’s version of what’s already happening in outbound sales — AI absorbs the volume tier first, and the headcount that survives faces a higher floor of complexity with less structural room to develop into it. If you’re building a career or a team in a function adjacent to customer service, Forrester’s 2030 number is the planning horizon, not a distant scenario.