Pantheon Macroeconomics counts artificial intelligence for more than 10,000 American job losses a month. Fortune reported the count Oct. 23, 20261. Samuel Tombs and Oliver Allen are the firm's economists.
They built the count from office losses: accounting, advertising, admin and legal work. Construction crews building data centers gain jobs in that count; refining sits outside every category it tracks.
The easy reading says refining escaped the AI cuts that hit the offices on Tombs and Allen's list. Read that way, a refinery job sounds protected already. The count misses whole categories of work on purpose, built from layoff announcements a company puts in writing. A shift that quietly runs with fewer hands skips that kind of announcement entirely.
Refining already runs AI hard enough to test that gap. Phillips 66 and Valero push AI across pumps, compressors and crude units5. They chase fewer surprise shutdowns and fatter margins. Every one of those changes stays off Tombs and Allen's list anyway.
That gap between heavy use and an empty list carries the real story here. It shows up clearest inside Refining's own union, where 30,000 workers tried to bargain over a change the monthly count leaves out entirely.
Richard Harbison runs the refining division at Phillips 66, and he told investors why the company leans on AI now. "The AI revolution here has really opened up our ability to analyze this data and look for trends," Harbison said on the company's second-quarter earnings call, Aug. 5, 20266. His division has already cut refining costs by more than $1 a barrel, heading toward $1.50, mostly from fewer sudden outages.
Phillips 66's AI Push Banks $1 a Barrel in Refining Cost Cuts, Aimed at $1.50
Phillips 66's own figure for structural cost cuts in its refining segment, dollars per barrel, reported on its Aug. 5, 2026 earnings call.
The blue dot is the cost cut Phillips 66 says it already banked; the magenta dot is the target its executives say the push is headed toward.
Source: The Motley Fool [6]. Chart by Ryan Elliott Dennis.
The numbers behind this chart
| Item | Already banked | Headed toward |
|---|---|---|
| Refining cost cut per barrel | $1.00 | $1.50 |
Tandra Perkins, an executive vice president at Phillips 66, described the same push from the plant floor. "I need my systems up more than they're down, being able to predict that obviously saves on maintenance costs," Perkins said at the Reuters Momentum AI conference in Austin on Sept. 25, 20265. Sensors on her pumps, compressors and heat exchangers now flag a failure before it shuts a unit down.
Every public account of these savings stops at uptime and cost per barrel. Staffing stays out of the sentence entirely.
Mike Smith chairs the United Steelworkers' National Oil Bargaining Program. He watched this exact gap from the workers' side of the table. Three hundred delegates from refinery and chemical locals met in Pittsburgh in August 2025 to set goals for 30,000 members' next contract3. "The AI proposal is really to protect us as we try to understand the impacts on our sector," Smith said.
Delegates wanted rules written into the contract on how AI could change their jobs2.
That contract arrived Feb. 6, 2026, a four-year deal with Marathon Petroleum setting the industry's pattern4. It raised pay 15 percent over four years, split 4, 3.5, 3.5 and 4 by year, and added a $2,500 signing bonus.
The United Steelworkers' own statement about the win runs several paragraphs, and the words "artificial intelligence" stay missing from every one of them.
Refinery Workers' Four-Year Raise Totals 15 Percent, Lightest in the Middle
Annual wage increase in the Marathon Petroleum-USW pattern agreement, by contract year, signed Feb. 6, 2026.
Each bar is one contract year's raise; the first and fourth years carry 4 percent, and the middle two run at 3.5 percent.
Source: United Steelworkers [4]. Chart by Ryan Elliott Dennis.
The numbers behind this chart
| Item | Value |
|---|---|
| Year 1 | 4% |
| Year 2 | 3.5% |
| Year 3 | 3.5% |
| Year 4 | 4% |
"USW members, across the country, across employers, across our industry, stood together in calling for a fair contract," Smith said in that same statement4. Fair, in his sentence, means the wage math and the bonus. It skips the technology that drove 300 delegates to write an AI clause into their goals eighteen months earlier.
Ask who pays for a gap a monthly count misses, and refiners answer first, in dollars. Phillips 66 already banks over $1 a barrel from AI-driven uptime, moving toward $1.5016. The change sits off every list Tombs and Allen check.
The workers who asked for a voice in that shift signed a contract that pays them well34. It writes AI protection out of the page. That risk stays real even where the monthly count stays empty.
This verdict holds. Refining already sits inside the gap Tombs and Allen's count misses. AI reshapes a plant's economics long before any layoff notice gives the change a number.
Workers get one shot at writing a floor under that risk, at the bargaining table. The country's refinery crews just spent theirs on wages instead. Their next chance comes in four years, after this contract runs out.
Readers who want the next AI number before it reaches a headline can get it daily, free, from The Signal. Sign up, and the figures that move your industry land in your inbox before they move the ones next door.
Sources
- Jim Edwards, "AI Is Killing 10,000-Plus Jobs per Month and 9% of Jobs Are at Risk, Analysts Say," Fortune, Oct. 23, 2026, https://fortune.com/2026/10/23/ai-is-killing-10000-plus-jobs-per-month-and-9-of-jobs-are-at-risk
- Frank Tang, "US Refineries, Union to Begin Contract Talks in January, as Industry Leans More on AI," OPIS, A Dow Jones Company, Dec. 24, 2025, https://www.opis.com/resources/energy-market-news-from-opis/us-refineries-union-to-begin-contract-talks-in-january-as-industry-leans-more-on-ai/
- Erwin Seba, "U.S. United Steelworkers Union Sets Proposals for Next Refinery Worker Contract," Reuters, Aug. 8, 2025, https://www.bicmagazine.com/departments/operations/us-united-steelworkers-union-sets-proposals/
- United Steelworkers, "USW Reaches National Pattern Agreement with Marathon," United Steelworkers, Feb. 6, 2026, https://usw.org/press-release/usw-reaches-national-pattern-agreement-with-marathon/
- Arathy Somasekhar, "US Refiner Phillips 66 Is Using AI to Predict Outages and Boost Processing, Executive Says," Reuters, Sept. 25, 2026, https://boereport.com/2026/09/25/us-refiner-phillips-66-is-using-ai-to-predict-outages-and-boost-processing-executive-says/
- The Motley Fool, "Phillips 66 (PSX) Q2 2026 Earnings Call Transcript," The Motley Fool, Aug. 5, 2026, https://www.fool.com/earnings/call-transcripts/2026/08/12/phillips-66-psx-q2-2026-earnings-call-transcript/