[DigitalToday reporter Jinju Hong] The spread of artificial intelligence could mean about 15 million U.S. workers may need to move from their current jobs into other roles, an outlook showed. Experts, however, expect AI to create new roles rather than eliminate all jobs.

On July 3, Business Insider reported that Joseph Briggs (조지프 브릭스), who leads the Goldman Sachs Research global economist team, said on a recent podcast that AI adoption could affect about 9 percent of the U.S. labour market. "9 percent of workers amounts to about 15 million people," he said. He explained that this is similar in scale to labour-market reshuffling seen during the late 1990s and early 2000s period of technological innovation.

Briggs stressed that the figure does not mean jobs themselves will disappear. He said it refers to the scale of workers pushed out of existing roles who would need to move into other fields, with labour-market redeployment at the core.

He also said changes are already showing up in areas where AI use has spread quickly. In technology, management consulting and graphic design, he estimated that growth in new hiring has fallen by about 10,000 to 15,000 jobs a month as AI takes over some tasks. That means AI is affecting the market by reducing demand for new hiring rather than directly replacing people.

Briggs, however, said technological progress is more likely to create new jobs over the long term. "About 85 percent of the jobs added over the past 80 years were new roles created by technological advancement," he said, adding that AI is likely to follow the same pattern.

He also cited the high mobility of the U.S. labour market. About 30 million jobs are created each year in the United States and 29 million disappear. Briggs said that in such a market, if the pace of new job creation is just 5 percent faster than before, it can absorb most workers displaced by AI.

A counterargument also emerged that the actual pace of AI spread could be slower than expected. Neil Thompson (닐 톰프슨), a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) who appeared on the same podcast, said AI performance and real-world industrial adoption are separate issues. He said AI replacing work requires meeting practical conditions such as data access rights, personal data rules and operating costs, and adoption could be limited in heavily regulated industries such as healthcare.

He also said most jobs are likely to see only some tasks automated rather than disappearing entirely. Citing the example of GPS taking over taxi drivers' navigation tasks while the number of drivers increased, he said, "AI is not a giant wave crashing down on workers, but closer to a rising tide that can be prepared for."

The outlook also aligns with a recently slowing U.S. job market. New U.S. employment in June rose by only 57,000, far below market expectations, and April and May employment figures were revised down by a total of 74,000. The unemployment rate was 4.2 percent, but a drop in the labour force participation rate was assessed to have had some impact.

Experts see AI's impact on the labour market as depending more on the pace of real-world adoption and the ability to create new jobs than on the technology itself. Future sector-by-sector hiring changes and employment indicators are expected to be key gauges of whether AI leads to a gradual restructuring or a bigger jobs shock.