Where AI Is Already Reshaping Hiring—and Where It Hasn’t

Goldman Sachs’ latest labor-market research suggests that artificial intelligence is already changing hiring—but not through a broad employment collapse. The strongest evidence appears in industries where AI tools are relatively mature, including call centers, software publishing, management consulting, advertising, and parts of the technology and creative sectors.

The pattern is most visible in job openings and sector-level employment trends. Across developed economies, industries with greater exposure to AI automation have generally recorded weaker job-opening growth since the second half of 2022. The relationship is particularly pronounced in Germany, Australia, and the United States.

The sectors showing the sharpest weakness

Four industries stand out in the available summaries of Goldman’s analysis:

• Call centers
• Software publishing
• Management consulting
• Advertising services

Employment in these industries has fallen below its historical trend across developed markets, with call centers showing the clearest gap. Goldman’s reported estimates put call-center employment at 39% below trend in the United States, 33% below trend in Canada, and 27% below trend in Germany.

That does not establish that AI alone caused every decline. Industry employment can also be affected by economic conditions, business cycles, outsourcing, and changes in demand. But the concentration of weakness in highly AI-exposed, digitally delivered work is consistent with Goldman’s conclusion that AI is beginning to leave a measurable imprint.

Germany, Australia, and the US show the clearest hiring signal

Goldman’s cross-country comparison does not show an identical effect everywhere. The connection between AI exposure and slower job-opening growth is strongest in Germany, Australia, and the United States.

This uneven pattern matters. If AI were already producing a uniform shock, the same employment effects would appear across every developed economy and industry. Instead, the current evidence points to a more selective transition: countries and sectors with greater exposure or faster practical adoption are showing pressure first.

Information and communication services have cooled—but not collapsed

Information and communication services are among the industries most exposed to AI. Employment growth in the sector has slowed across nearly all major developed economies since 2022. However, the level of employment outside the United States remains around or above its pre-2022 position, according to the reported Goldman findings.

That distinction between slower growth and falling employment is central to interpreting the research. A sector can continue adding workers while expanding more slowly than it did before. The data therefore indicate a cooling in labor demand, not necessarily widespread displacement across the entire information economy.

Junior and entry-level white-collar workers face particular pressure

The research has drawn attention to junior and entry-level workers because the hiring slowdown is especially relevant to early-career white-collar roles. Reports on Goldman’s findings describe these workers as bearing the greatest pressure as companies reassess roles in highly exposed sectors.

The supplied findings do not establish a single precise estimate for the relative effect on entry-level employment. They do, however, support a clear interpretation: AI’s early labor-market impact is showing up in the hiring pipeline and in occupations built around standardized digital work, rather than as an economy-wide wave of job losses.

For workers and employers, this makes the composition of hiring as important as the total number of jobs. A stable overall employment figure can conceal a meaningful shift in which roles companies are willing to fill, particularly in sectors where software can perform or augment routine information-processing tasks.

The aggregate US effect remains modest

Goldman estimates that current corporate AI adoption has raised the US unemployment rate by about 0.1 percentage point.

Joseph Briggs, a Goldman Sachs Research economist, separately estimated that AI was creating a drag of roughly 10,000 to 15,000 jobs per month across currently affected areas such as technology, management consulting, and graphic design. He characterized the effect as a narrow labor-market shock rather than a major hit to the broader economy.

These estimates put the sector-level declines in context. A large employment gap in a particular industry can coexist with a relatively small change in national unemployment when the affected sectors represent only part of the economy and when AI also supports productivity or complementary work.

Why Goldman calls the effect “visible but narrow”

Goldman’s description captures two facts at once:

1. The signal is visible. AI-exposed industries have experienced weaker job-opening growth, and several specific sectors have fallen below historical employment trends.
2. The shock is still narrow. The evidence does not show a generalized collapse across the labor market, and employment in some highly exposed sectors remains stable or above earlier levels outside the US.

The balance could change as businesses move from experimentation to broader deployment. Goldman’s earlier work projected that AI could expose the equivalent of 300 million full-time jobs globally to automation, while also noting that AI-related investment and infrastructure could create new employment.

That longer-term exposure estimate is not a forecast that 300 million people will immediately lose their jobs. It describes work whose tasks could be affected by automation. The latest labor-market evidence suggests the transition has begun in selected sectors—but its economy-wide consequences remain limited so far.

The practical takeaway

Goldman Sachs’ research offers neither an all-clear nor an AI apocalypse. The most defensible reading is that AI is already influencing hiring where tools are mature and work is highly digital, with call centers, software publishing, consulting, advertising, and junior white-collar roles under particular pressure.

For now, the effect is concentrated enough to remain modest at the national level. But the sector-specific evidence provides an early warning: if corporate adoption accelerates and expands into more occupations, the hiring slowdown now visible in a few industries could become a broader labor-market trend.