Goldman Sachs Says AI Will Eliminate 15 Million US Jobs

Goldman Sachs has increased its estimate of the share of U.S. jobs that could be displaced by generative artificial intelligence (AI) from the previous 6-7% to over 9%, Seeking Alpha reported Thursday (June 25).

That displacement, which would amount to about 15 million workers, could take place over 10 years, Goldman Sachs Economist Joseph Briggs said in the report.

The new estimate is based on a methodology that examines the “flow” of workers out of existing jobs, while the previous one looked at the “stock” of unemployed workers, according to the report.

The current methodology assumes that each 1% increase in technology-driven productivity will cause a 0.5% to 0.6% increase in the job destruction rate over the following two years, the report said.

While Goldman Sachs expects that AI productivity will exceed that of earlier technologies, Briggs said the company also forecasts that AI will generate new jobs over the long run and add to the 25 million to 35 million new jobs that are already created each year by the U.S. economy, per the report.

If job losses are distributed over 10 years and most workers find new employment within a year, the peak unemployment rate impact of AI would be less than 1%, Briggs said in the report.

PYMNTS reported June 3 that AI is creating new job categories. Box CEO Aaron Levie wrote in a post on X that the role of forward deployed engineers are set to become one of the most in-demand positions in tech. Levie told The New York Times that AI has created 13 new job categories at Box, including AI architects, AI solutions managers, model evaluators and AI business automation engineers.

On the other hand, Andy Challenger, labor and workplace expert at outplacement firm Challenger, Gray and Christmas, said June 4 that AI is now “the leading reason companies give for cutting jobs, and the primary industry citing it is technology.”

It was reported in May that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said at a conference that AI has eliminated fewer entry-level white-collar jobs than he had predicted earlier. Altman said he “thought there would have been more impact.”

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