Artificial intelligence (AI) has shown accelerated development in recent years, significantly impacting human production and lifestyles, with employment being the first to bear the brunt. Employment serves as the foundation of people’s livelihoods, and it is urgent to conduct research on employment effects of AI in the current grim employment situation. Current researches mainly focus on phenomenal descriptions and theoretical explanations, with a few quantitative researches yielding different conclusions. Therefore, it is necessary to reveal employment effects of AI using samples with broader scope and time span. The meta-analysis is conducted to research the employment effect of AI. The results indicate that AI application is positively correlated with overall employment and with medium- and high-skilled jobs, but negatively correlated with low-skilled jobs. The development of AI has moderating effects on above relationships. This means that while AI promotes overall employment, it presents expansion effects for medium- and high-skilled jobs and replacement effects for low-skilled jobs. Therefore, it is necessary to promote the industrial development and application scenario expansion of AI to fully leverage its job expansion effects. Meanwhile, the job replacement effect should be acknowledged, and proactive measures should be taken to address the structural unemployment shocks in the era of AI.