A new Wall Street study just put real numbers behind something workers have suspected for years. Artificial intelligence isn’t just changing how people work; it’s also changing who gets hired.
Goldman Sachs spent months tracking the data across multiple countries, and the picture that emerged is more specific and useful than the usual AI doom headlines.
Goldman Sachs AI jobs report: entry-level workers and call-center employment 2026
Artificial intelligence has started to weigh on the labor markets across major developed economies, but effects vary by industry and level. Goldman found that industries with greater AI exposure have generally seen slower job openings growth since the second half of 2022, a pattern especially pronounced in the United States.
Information and communication services, among the most AI-exposed industries, have seen slowing employment growth across nearly every major developed economy since 2022, according to BeInCrypto, Goldman said in the report published Aug. 19.
Outside the U.S., though, employment in those industries still sits near or above its long-term trend.
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Call centers stand out as the clearest example. Employment in the industry is now 39% below trend in the U.S., 33% below trend in Canada, and 27% below trend in Germany, Goldman found, alongside similar declines in software publishing, management consulting, and advertising.
The pain isn’t spread evenly by age or experience, either.
Goldman analyzed employment growth across more than 800 occupations and found AI-related headwinds were strongest among entry-level workers, with a smaller but still negative effect on occupations Goldman considers highly exposed to displacement, CNBC reported.
AI job losses of 16,000 per month: what Goldman payroll data show
This isn’t the first time Goldman has flagged the trend. The bank has estimated AI could displace roughly 15 million American workers over the next decade, about 9% of the workforce.
The forecast landed the same month June payrolls came in at just 57,000, less than half of what economists expected, according to TheStreet.
Peng broke the monthly job picture into two columns. The substitution column, where AI replaces a human outright, runs at about 25,000 a month. The augmentation column, where AI creates adjacent work, adds back roughly 9,000.
That leaves a hole of about 16,000 every month. By June, the hole had narrowed to about 11,000. Data-center construction was the reason, not any slowdown in what AI was doing to white-collar work.
Younger workers are absorbing most of that gap. Major employers, including Amazon, Oracle, and Meta, have all made deep cuts this year amid an aggressive AI investment push, adding to the pressure on workers trying to reenter the job market.
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AI adoption unfolds amid employment slowdown, Fed rate-cut pressure
The employment slowdown is unfolding as AI adoption keeps climbing.
Goldman combined 11 separate surveys measuring AI adoption and found that major developed economies now sit at adoption rates of roughly 15% to 20%, led by France, the U.S., the Netherlands, and the U.K. Meanwhile, Italy, Japan, and New Zealand trail behind, BigGo Finance noted.
That combination, rising AI adoption alongside softer hiring, is exactly what has the Federal Reserve paying closer attention.
A New York Fed study found AI is more likely to reshape jobs than trigger a sudden spike in unemployment in the near term.
But the bank cautioned that AI could gradually restructure the labor market, wages, and productivity, creating longer-term complications for policymakers trying to balance the Fed’s dual mandate of price stability and maximum employment, according to TheStreet.
Goldman economist Joseph Briggs has framed the stakes directly for markets. “If we see some job losses pulled forward, that sets the stage for potential underperformance relative to our forecast, and that may lead the Federal Reserve to cut rates,” he said.
July payrolls were down 23,000. Unemployment was 4.1%. Those two numbers don’t usually move together.
Payrolls drop when people lose jobs. Unemployment drops when people find them. Something in the middle is happening, and Goldman’s data is one of the better attempts to explain what.
What Goldman Sachs’ AI labor market warning means for workers, job seekers
There are no mass layoffs in Goldman’s data. What there is: a manager whose team of five used to handle a workload that three people can now cover with AI tools.
Two positions just quietly disappeared from next year’s headcount plan. No announcement. No severance. The jobs never came back.
That distinction matters for how the labor market evolves going forward. The reason early AI deployment hasn’t visibly hurt workers more is that the occupations most exposed to AI were already short-staffed, giving the market a built-in cushion.
That cushion is largely gone now, and the next wave of automation is likely to land on occupations that are no longer running short on candidates.
For all the young workers and policymakers, the practical takeaway is to watch the adoption rates and entry-level hiring as leading indicators, and not the unemployment rate.
As Goldman’s own data show, the real pressure builds well before it shows up there.
Related: Bank of America gives surprise verdict on AI, U.S. jobs
