The Signal · Column 032

Goldman asked where AI squeezes labour, not how much

Andrei van Noordt · 20 August 2026 · 2 min read

Goldman Sachs has gone looking for the places where AI is squeezing labour markets, and the most useful thing about the work is the shape of the question. Not how much. Not when. Where. That framing is doing more work than the headline suggests, because a study that asks where has already conceded that the answer is uneven, and unevenness is precisely the part that most hiring plans I read this year fail to price.

I think the common misreading is one of instruments. People reach for national figures to answer a question that only makes sense at the level of a team, a function, a rung on a ladder. At that altitude, a genuine squeeze inside one discipline shows up as a rounding error, while the hiring market a specific manager is actually standing in has changed shape entirely. The second misreading is the word squeeze itself. It gets heard as cheaper, as slack, as a buyer's market arriving. That is not what a squeeze is. A squeeze is a market where the middle thins out and both ends get further apart.

A squeezed function does not need fewer good people. It needs better ones, and it needs them from a supply that was never deep.

Watch what happens inside a function where tooling absorbs the routine layer. The volume of work that any competent person could do goes down. What remains is the layer that requires someone to decide whether the output is right, and that layer was never staffed generously to begin with. So the same team that now needs fewer bodies needs a higher grade of person in the ones it keeps, and the market for that person does not soften just because your headcount plan did. Everyone else running the same arithmetic arrives at the same narrow band of candidates in the same quarter.

For hiring leaders, the practical read is simple. Stop taking the macro headline as a signal about your own funnel and audit it role by role. Take your open positions from the past twelve months and sort them into two columns: the ones that have become easier to fill, and the ones that have quietly become harder. The split will not be uniform, and it will not match the narrative. Whatever sits in the second column is where the squeeze actually landed in your business, and that is where the budget belongs before the rest of the market finishes doing the same exercise.