The AI layoff panic that peaked this spring has gone quiet. Goldman Sachs thinks the layoffs are waiting for a recession. “Concerns of imminent AI-related labor displacement have cooled in recent months after hitting a fever pitch this spring,” Goldman economist Joseph Briggs wrote in a note published Thursday. Then he laid out what may be coming. Under the bank’s forecast that AI eventually lifts productivity by 15% in the U.S. and other developed economies, he found that up to 9% of workers could be “displaced during the AI transition,” with slower hiring weighing on employment by another 3%. That’s roughly one in 11 workers. The bigger finding is about timing. Briggs went back through decades of data on how technology has replaced workers and found that “automation-related labor disruption is limited when the overall economy is healthy but accelerates during cyclical slowdowns.” Goldman has now made this argument twice, a year apart, from two different teams. In October 2025, Goldman’s U.S. economists David Mericle and Pierfrancesco Mei called “jobless growth” the likely new normal, Fortune reported at the time. “The modest job growth alongside robust GDP growth seen recently is likely to be normal to some degree in the years ahead,” they wrote. Then came their warning: “History also suggests that the full consequences of AI for the labor market might not become apparent until a recession hits.” Read more [paywall removed for Redditors]: https://fortune.com/2026/10/22/goldman-sachs-forecast-how-many-jobs-lost-to-ai-9-percent/ submitted by /u/fortune
Originally posted by u/fortune on r/ArtificialInteligence