1 in 11 employees: the next recession could trigger a wave of AI-related layoffs

According to Goldman Sachs, artificial intelligence could ultimately cause 9% of employees to lose their jobs. The bank estimates that these cuts will occur especially during the next economic slowdown, while layoffs attributed to AI fell significantly in the fall of 2026 in the United States.

Joseph Briggs, an economist at Goldman Sachs, published a new estimate of the effect of AI on employment, reported by Fortune. If AI ultimately increases productivity by 15% in the United States and other developed countries, up to 9% of employees could lose their jobs during the transition, and about 3% more would be affected by a slowdown in hiring. That’s roughly one in eleven employees. In August 2025, Joseph Briggs and Sarah Dong still put forward a range of 6 to 7%, and in June 2026, Joseph Briggs was already talking about around 9%, or 15 million American employees over ten years.

In his note, Joseph Briggs writes that “job market disruptions linked to automation remain limited when the economy is doing well, but accelerate during downturns.” In October 2025, two other Goldman Sachs economists, David Mericle and Pierfrancesco Mei, already estimated that the full consequences of AI “may not appear until a recession”. The bank's scenario is therefore that companies keep their employees as long as growth holds, then take advantage of the next crisis to replace part of the positions with AI.

Every month, the firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas lists the job cuts announced by American companies. In its report published on November 5, 2026, it counted 617,189 job cuts between January and October 2026, or 44% less than over the same period of 2025. AI was cited as the reason in 121,401 cases, around 20% of the total. In July, it was the first reason given by employers for the fifth consecutive month, with 10,970 deletions in the month alone. In October, it was cited for only 1,265 positions, its lowest level of the year, and “economic and market conditions” once again became the number one reason. Tech remains the sector most affected, with 171,501 jobs lost since January, 21% more than in 2025. “It’s an environment where there are few layoffs,” summarizes Andy Challenger, commercial director of the firm.

Several studies also doubt that AI is the real cause of the layoffs attributed to it. On January 7, 2026, Oxford Economics noted that American productivity was slowing rather than accelerating: “If AI were already replacing work on a large scale, productivity growth should accelerate. In general, this is not the case.” The firm suspected some companies were presenting their layoffs as good technological news rather than a sign of trouble. In February, the Yale Budget Lab came to the same conclusion. For its director Martha Gimbel, companies can highlight AI to avoid talking about customs duties, immigration or political uncertainty.

Machine-translated from French