Goldman Sachs has tracked four decades of Americans who lost their jobs to technology. The first workers laid off from AI-exposed jobs are starting to look a lot like them, the investment bank wrote in a note published Thursday.
Goldman economist Pierfrancesco Mei found that workers displaced from AI-exposed jobs since 2025 took about a month longer to find a new job than other displaced workers. They were also roughly 10 percentage points more likely to still be unemployed a year after losing their job. Those effects are “comparable in magnitude” to what Goldman found in earlier waves of technological change, he wrote, calling the damage from those waves “long-lasting.”
As in those waves, older workers are having the harder time so far. 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 government’s numbers for all laid-off workers, not just those in AI-exposed jobs, show the same age gap. The Labor Department survey Goldman used counted 7.4 million workers displaced from 2023 through 2025, up from 6.3 million in the prior survey, which covered 2021 through 2023, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported in August. Among those who had held their jobs at least three years, 72.9% of workers ages 25 to 54 were working again by January 2026, compared with 57.3% of those 55 to 64 and 38.6% of those 65 and older.
Employers have cited AI in 120,136 announced job cuts through September, about 21% of all cuts and the top reason given, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas’ September report.
What four decades of tech layoffs did
Goldman’s earlier research used individual-level data going back to 1979. It found that in the years after losing a job to technology, workers’ real earnings grew more slowly than those of other displaced workers. Their odds of another spell of unemployment stayed persistently higher.
The pay hit is already showing up in the broader data. 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, according to BLS.
The damage wasn’t spread evenly. Younger, college-educated and urban workers saw cumulative real earnings losses about half as large as other technology-displaced workers over the 10 years after losing their jobs. Workers with less time at the job they lost also did better, “likely because their skills were less occupation-specific and therefore more transferable,” Mei wrote.
The age split is showing up again
The new data shows a similar pattern by age. Besides getting back to full-time work faster, younger AI-displaced workers cycled through fewer temporary jobs along the way. They were also less likely to hold a second job alongside their new full-time one.
Mei wrote that younger workers “may be able to adapt more flexibly to AI disruption.” He called that “an encouraging sign given concerns that AI-driven job losses could disproportionately affect recent graduates.” Goldman also found that college students are increasingly choosing majors that lead to jobs with lower AI exposure and stronger growth.
Goldman cautioned it’s “still too early to assess the impact along all of these dimensions,” such as education and geography.
Other research suggests young workers are getting hit somewhere else: at the front door. Stanford’s Digital Economy Lab, using ADP payroll data, found in August that employment for workers ages 22 to 25 in the most AI-exposed occupations is about 19% below where it would be if it had kept pace with similarly aged workers in less-exposed jobs.
“Experienced workers show no comparable gap,” wrote Erik Brynjolfsson, Bharat Chandar, and Ruyu Chen. The adjustment “appears to operate primarily through reduced hiring of young workers rather than increased separations,” they wrote.
Goldman’s data only covers people who had a job to lose.
How Goldman counted
The data comes from the Current Population Survey’s Displaced Worker Supplement. It’s a survey run every two years that asks people who lost a job involuntarily over the prior three years what happened next. Goldman analyzed more than 15,000 displaced workers who lost jobs between 2016 and 2025. That includes newly released data on 2023 to 2025 job losses, a group Goldman said “likely captures the first wave of AI-displaced workers.”
No survey question asks whether AI cost someone their job. So Goldman built a score from the occupation’s AI exposure, the industry’s AI adoption rate and whether the position was eliminated, and treated the top 30% as likely AI-displaced. Goldman found no significant gap between the two groups for job losses before 2023, the year AI adoption began to rise.
Not everyone sees AI moving the overall job market yet. The Stanford researchers wrote they “do not see widespread, economy-wide job displacement associated with AI.” The Yale Budget Lab, which tracks the question with Current Population Survey data, has found that measures of AI exposure, automation, and augmentation “show no sign of being related to changes in employment or unemployment,” as Fortune’s Sasha Rogelberg reported in February.
The old pattern, again
In past waves, workers who lost jobs to technology were more likely to get rehired into more routine, less complex work, likely because the change that cut their jobs had also lowered the value of their skills. That’s the kind of work the next round of technology could take.
Goldman sees early signs of that again. AI-displaced workers are more likely to leave their old occupation and industry altogether. But when they get rehired, more of them, “especially older ones,” are moving into roles with similar or even higher AI exposure.
Generative AI was used for research assistance and/or transcription of this article. The reporter independently reported and verified the factual claims in this article, and a human editor reviewed it before publication.
Written by Nick Lichtenberg for Fortune as “Goldman says AI layoffs are starting to leave a ‘long-lasting’ scar, just like the last 40 years of history” and republished legally through syndication agreement with Reuters Connect.
