AI is coming for millions of American jobs, but that doesn’t mean the work will disappear for good.
Joseph Briggs, who leads the global economics team at Goldman Sachs Research, said on a recent episode of the bank’s “Exchanges” podcast that he expects about 9% of the US workforce to be displaced as AI is adopted across the economy.
“9% of workers being displaced by AI would correspond to 15 million workers,” Briggs said, comparing the scale of the shift to the tech-driven upheaval of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Those workers, he said, would have to leave their current positions and find new jobs.
The effects are already visible
In sectors where AI tools are being used — like tech, management consulting, and graphic design — Briggs estimates the technology is cutting 10,000 to 15,000 jobs from monthly employment growth. However, Briggs rejected the idea put forward by many tech leaders that jobs will be permanently displaced, arguing it fixates on jobs destroyed while ignoring those created.
History is on his side, he said: “If we look back over the last 80 years, around 85% of job growth has been driven by the technological creation of new positions.”
The labor market also churns constantly, with roughly 30 million jobs created and 29 million destroyed every year, he told podcast host Alison Nathan. Against that backdrop, even a 5% pickup in the pace of job creation would be enough to reabsorb everyone AI displaces.
Not everyone expects a big disruption
MIT’s Neil Thompson, who also appeared on the podcast, argued the shift will be slower than AI’s rapidly improving capabilities suggest. Capability is only step one, he said: an AI system also needs access to the right information, tricky in fields like medicine, where privacy rules get in the way, and it has to be cheap enough to be worth running. Those hurdles mean adoption may lag well behind what AI can technically do.
Most jobs can be partly automated rather than eliminated, Thompson said, and the outcome depends on which tasks machines take over. When GPS automated taxi drivers’ expert knowledge of city routes, wages fell, but the number of drivers exploded.
AI, in his framing, is a “rising tide” workers can see coming and adapt to, not a “crashing wave” that sweeps them away.
A cooling job market
Meanwhile, hiring is slowing. The June jobs report, released Thursday, showed the US economy added just 57,000 jobs, roughly half what economists expected. April and May were also revised down by a combined 74,000. The unemployment rate dipped to 4.2%, though largely because workers left the labor force.
Whether those numbers are the rising tide or the first crashing wave remains to be seen.