AI is cutting 10,000 jobs a month. Goldman says 9% of all workers are next.

Two separate banks have now done the arithmetic on AI-driven job losses, and the numbers are unpleasant enough to deserve more attention than they've been getting.

Pantheon Macroeconomics put the current rate at over 10,000 roles per month in the U.S., concentrated in accounting, advertising, legal services, and office admin. The sectors that are growing, construction mostly, are growing because someone has to physically build the data centres eating everyone else's lunch.

At Goldman Sachs, analyst Joseph Briggs told clients that under Goldman's baseline forecast of a 15% productivity increase from AI, around 9% of workers face temporary displacement during the transition. Temporary is doing a lot of work in that sentence.

The more telling detail is Briggs's observation that media concern about AI layoffs has "cooled" even as the labour market data showing exactly that has continued to arrive. Public attention moved on. The job losses didn't.