A screen displays the company’s logo for Goldman Sachs on the field on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in New York, in the United States, on May 7, 2025.
Brendan McDermid | Reuters
Changes in the American labor market caused by the arrival of generative AI already appear in employment data, according to a Goldman Sachs economist.
Most companies must still deploy artificial intelligence in production cases, which means that the overall labor market has not yet been significantly affected by AI, said Joseph Briggs, global economist in the Goldman research division, in an episode of Podcast shared with CNBC.
But there are already signs of a hiring decline in the technology sector, hitting young employees there, said Briggs.
“If you look at the technology sector employment, they have mainly grown up starting from overall employment in a remarkably linear way for 20 years,” said Briggs in the episode of “Goldman Sachs Exchanges” to broadcast on Tuesday.
“In the past three years, we have in fact seen a decline in the technological hiring which has led him to underlie his trend,” he said.
Since its release in November 2022, the Openai chatgpt has fueled the rise of the most precious society in the world, NvidiaAnd forced entire industries to face its implications. Generative AI models quickly become an overview of managing many routine tasks, and some experts say they are already tied with human software engineers, for example.
This has aroused concern that, although automation makes companies more productive and enriched shareholders, labor market bands could be affected in the years to come.
Technology leaders have recently become more frank on the impact of AI on employees. Companies like Alphabet and Microsoft have declared that AI produces around 30% of the code on certain projects, and Dirty CEO Marc Benioff said in June that AI manages up to 50% of the work of his business.
According to Briggs, young technology workers, whose jobs are the easiest to automate, are the first concrete signs of travel.
Unemployment rates among technological workers between 20 and 30 years old have jumped 3 percentage points since the start of this year, he said. Briggs recently co-author a report entitled “Quantification of the risk of employment of employment linked to the AI” which cites the data of the labor market of IPUMs and Goldman Sachs Global Investment Research.
“This is a much greater increase than we have seen in the technological sector [and] A greater increase than we have seen for other young workers, “he said.
“Substitution of work”
The approach of technological CEOs has been to keep employees of the hiring of juniors while they are starting to deploy AI, said George Lee, the former technological banker who co-directs the Goldman Sachs Global Institute.
“How to start rationalizing my business so that I can be more flexible and more adaptive … Yet without harming our competitive advantage?” Lee said in the episode of the Podcast. “Young employees for this period are a bit of the victims of this.”
Over time, around 6% to 7% of all workers could lose their jobs due to AI automation in a reference scenario, according to Briggs.
The transition could be more painful, both for workers and the American economy, if the adoption between companies occurs more quickly than the period of about a decade it supposes, said Briggs.
This could be because of technological advances or an economic slowdown that encourages companies to reduce costs, he said.
If IA researchers reach AGE, or general artificial intelligence, this is equivalent to the ability of a person to learn and adapt through the areas, instead of being deployed closely, the impact on workers would be deeper, said the Goldman economist.
“Our analysis does not take into account the potential for the emergence of the act,” said Briggs. “It is even difficult to start thinking about the impact on the labor market, but I suppose that it is probably and undoubtedly more room for the substitution of work and a more disruptive impact in this world.”