McKinsey: AI will create more jobs than it kills — after destroying 11 million

AI and automation will cut demand for about 36 million U.S. jobs by 2035 while growth elsewhere creates about 41 million, according to a new report from the McKinsey Global Institute.

The jobs will exist, the authors argue, but it's getting workers into them that's the problem.

"The next decade's challenge is mobility, not scarcity," they wrote.

In its base case, about 11 million workers, roughly 7% of the workforce, would need to leave their occupations entirely, with a range of 6 million to 16 million. That's close to the firm's 2023 forecast of 12 million career switches by 2030.

Most of those workers would have to jump into an entirely different field, such as retail to healthcare. McKinsey estimates about 770,000 people a year would need to make that kind of switch, roughly 3.6 times the historical average. About 788,000 workers a year made similar moves between 2019 and 2022, during the pandemic, without lasting damage, the report notes.

That would represent a big change for workers, who already move between employers less often than they did in the late 1990s and early 2000s, apart from a brief surge during the pandemic, the report notes.

The shrinking jobs are concentrated in office and administrative support, retail, and transportation, much of it lower-paid work. Lower-wage workers are 7.6 times as likely as higher-wage workers to need a new occupation. Meanwhile, job growth is in healthcare, construction, and management.

Richard Florida, the urbanist and author of The Rise of the Creative Class , told Fortune that shifts like this have happened before. "We used to have most people working in agriculture. Now 1% of the workforce works in agriculture," he said. "We used to have most people working in manufacturing—50, 60% working in manufacturing. Now 5 to 6% of the workforce works in manufacturing."

Florida, who was not involved in the McKinsey report, expects displaced service workers to land in what he called "a broad bucket" of wellness work, from fitness and dermatology to Pilates studios. "I think that there will be some displacement," he said. "But I think this is also the area we're going to create the most work." Some of the old service jobs, he said, "become transformed into much higher-paying wellness jobs."

McKinsey's data says some of those moves can be difficult for certain workers. Only one in seven displaced workers has a direct path into a growing job, meaning one that needs little retraining and pays at least as much. Nearly half face what the report calls an "unpaved" path, blocked by large skill gaps or credential requirements. About 85% of growing jobs require a credential.