AI is coming to millions of American jobs, but that doesn’t mean the job will disappear forever.

Joseph Briggs, who heads Goldman Sachs Research’s global economics team, said on a recent episode of the bank’s “Exchanges” podcast that he expects about 9% of the U.S. workforce to be displaced as AI is adopted across the economy.

“9% of workers displaced by AI would be equivalent to 15 million workers,” Briggs said, comparing the scale of the change to the technology-driven upheaval of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Those workers, he said, would have to leave their current positions and find new jobs.

The effects are already visible

In sectors where AI tools are used (such as technology, management consulting and graphic design), Briggs estimates that the technology is eliminating between 10,000 and 15,000 jobs due to monthly employment growth. However, Briggs rejected the idea proposed by many tech leaders that jobs will be permanently displaced, arguing that it focuses on jobs destroyed and ignores those created.

History is on their side, he said: “If we look back over the last 80 years, about 85% of job growth has been driven by the technological creation of new jobs.”

The job market is also constantly changing, with approximately 30 million jobs created and 29 million destroyed each year, he told podcast host Alison Nathan. In that context, even a 5% increase in the pace of job creation would be enough to reabsorb all those displaced by AI.

Not everyone expects a major disruption

MIT’s Neil Thompson, who also appeared on the podcast, argued that change will be slower than AI’s rapidly improving capabilities suggest. Capability is just the first step, he said: An AI system also needs access to the right information, complicated in fields like medicine, where privacy rules get in the way, and it has to be cheap enough to be worth running. Those hurdles mean adoption may lag far behind what AI can technically do.

Most jobs can be partially automated rather than eliminated, Thompson said, and the outcome depends on what tasks the machines take on. When GPS automated taxi drivers’ expert knowledge of city routes, wages fell, but the number of drivers soared.

AI, in its formulation, is a “rising tide” that workers can see coming and adapt to, not a “wave that sweeps them away.”

A cooling labor market

Meanwhile, hiring is slowing. The June jobs report, released Thursday, showed the U.S. economy added just 57,000 jobs, about half of what economists expected. April and May were also revised down by a combined total of 74,000. The unemployment rate fell to 4.2%, although largely because workers left the labor force.

It remains to be seen whether those numbers are the rising tide or the first wave to crash.