Goldman: AI-Displaced Workers Wait a Month Longer for Jobs

Workers displaced from AI-exposed jobs since 2025 took about a month longer to find a new job than other displaced workers, and were roughly 10 percentage points more likely to still be unemployed a year after losing their job. That is the central finding from a new Goldman Sachs analysis of the Labor Department's Displaced Worker Supplement, reported by Fortune.

Goldman economist Pierfrancesco Mei built an AI-exposure score from an occupation's AI exposure, an industry's AI adoption rate, and whether the position itself was eliminated, then applied it to more than 15,000 displaced workers in the survey running from 2016 through 2025. The top 30% of scores are what he treats as AI-displaced.

The age split is the sharpest cut. "AI-displaced workers 35 and older took about five weeks longer than other displaced workers to get back to full-time work. For those under 35, it was about three weeks," the article reports. The wage side looks similar. "Of long-tenured workers who lost full-time jobs from 2023 through 2025 and found full-time work again, about 49% were earning as much as or more than before, down from about 62% in the prior survey."

The backdrop is a labor market where AI is now cited by name on pink slips. Employers blamed AI for 120,136 announced job cuts through September, about 21% of all cuts and the top reason given. The underlying Labor Department survey counted 7.4 million workers displaced from 2023 through 2025, up from 6.3 million the time before.

Mei also looked back. In the stretch of tech disruptions he covers, "in the years after losing a job to technology, workers' real earnings grew more slowly than those of other displaced workers." The paper does not break the one-month delay down by occupation or publish a list of which jobs sit inside the top-30% exposure bucket.

The story lands in a run of jobs coverage on our tracker: it is the 108th AI-and-jobs alert we've logged in the last 90 days, arriving the same day as a Careerminds reading that a third of AI layoffs have since been reversed.