---
title: "McKinsey says AI will create more jobs than it kills; the catch is getting people into them"
description: "The McKinsey Global Institute sees 41 million jobs created and 36 million displaced by 2035, and the difference is paperwork"
author: "Nate Ledger"
published: 2026-10-03T08:00:00Z
modified: 2026-10-03T14:44:11Z
url: https://rews.cc/a/mckinsey-says-ai-will-create-more-jobs-than-it-kills-the-cat-83a5fe
language: en
tags: ["ai", "automation", "jobs", "workforce", "economy", "us", "business"]
publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)"
---

# McKinsey says AI will create more jobs than it kills; the catch is getting people into them

*The McKinsey Global Institute sees 41 million jobs created and 36 million displaced by 2035, and the difference is paperwork*

By Nate Ledger · October 3, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/mckinsey-says-ai-will-create-more-jobs-than-it-kills-the-cat-83a5fe

## In brief

- McKinsey Global Institute sees 36 million U.S. jobs displaced by 2035 but about 41 million created, a net gain
- Base case: 11 million workers, ~7% of the workforce, must change occupations entirely; range 6–16 million
- About 770,000 people a year would need to switch fields, roughly 3.6 times the historical average
- Only one in seven displaced workers has a direct path to a growing job; 85% of growing jobs require a credential
- Ken Griffin committed $3 billion to Carnegie Mellon, including $2 billion for a Miami campus opening in 2028

Here is a business model you will be familiar with. Someone applies for a job posting. The job posting asks for a credential, some certificate or degree or licence that takes months or years and often thousands of dollars to obtain. The applicant does not have the credential, because until recently they had a different job, the kind that is quietly being automated away. The employer complains it cannot find workers. Everybody involved is, in a narrow sense, behaving rationally, and the person who needed a job still doesn’t have one.

This is roughly the picture in a new report from the McKinsey Global Institute, which tries to answer the question of what AI and automation will do to the American labour market and arrives at an answer that is, on the headline numbers, oddly reassuring. Demand for about 36 million U.S. jobs disappears by 2035. Growth elsewhere creates about 41 million. Net net: more jobs. The fraction of the workforce displaced turns out to be manageable — in McKinsey’s base case about 11 million people, roughly 7% of the workforce, in a range of 6 million to 16 million, which is basically in line with the firm’s 2023 forecast of 12 million career switches by 2030. None of this requires a dystopia.

The problem, as the authors put it, is that “the next decade’s challenge is mobility, not scarcity.” The jobs will exist. The workers will exist. The jobs and the workers are in different places, require different skills and, crucially, different pieces of paper. It is a matching problem. Matching problems are the worst kind of problem, because nobody gets to solve them by writing a cheque.

Consider what the transition actually looks like. The shrinking jobs cluster in office and administrative support, retail and transportation — mostly lower-paid work, which is why lower-wage workers are 7.6 times as likely as higher-wage workers to need a new occupation. The growing jobs are in healthcare, construction and management. So McKinsey estimates about 770,000 people a year would need to jump occupations entirely — retail worker to nurse’s aide, say — which is roughly 3.6 times the historical average for that kind of switch. The report notes, in a hopeful spirit, that about 788,000 workers a year made similar moves between 2019 and 2022, during the pandemic, without lasting damage. That is true, and also the pandemic labour market was one in which the government mailed everyone cheques and employers were desperate enough to hire whoever walked in. Whether that counts as a proof of concept or a one-off is a genuinely open question.

It does not help that Americans already switch jobs less often than they did in the late 1990s and early 2000s, a brief pandemic surge aside. The plan, in effect, is to triple-down on a behaviour the workforce has been steadily abandoning.

## The toll booth

Then there is the credential question, which is where I think the report gets quietly brutal. Only one in seven displaced workers has what McKinsey calls a direct path into a growing job — one that requires little retraining and pays at least as well. Nearly half face what the report calls an “unpaved” path, blocked by big skill gaps or credential requirements. About 85% of growing jobs require a credential of some sort. The economy, in other words, has built a toll booth at the entrance to nearly every road that leads anywhere, and the people being routed off the old roads are, disproportionately, the people least able to pay the toll in time or tuition.

And the new jobs are tied down in a way the old ones increasingly weren’t. Roughly 76% of growing jobs can’t be done remotely, McKinsey found — hospitals, construction sites, data centers. So mobility isn’t just occupational. It is geographic: move towns, move states, move to where the buildings are being built.

Richard Florida, the urbanist who wrote *The Rise of the Creative Class* and who was not involved in the report, told Fortune that big occupational reshuffles are, historically, normal. “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.” His bet is that displaced service workers end up in what he calls “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.”

Sure. Though it is worth pausing on the mechanism there: a retail clerk does not wake up one morning as a higher-paid wellness professional. The job transforms at the level of the economy, not the person. The person has to do some transforming of their own, at their own expense, through a credentialing system with, again, a toll booth on it. (We have been here before with the question of whether AI is actually eating entry-level work; [the data, so far, are suspiciously calm](https://rews.cc/a/the-ai-jobs-apocalypse-for-new-graduates-is-so-far-not-in-th-044d99).)

## Talent anchors

Florida’s more interesting observation is about where this all happens. Manual work, he notes — farm work, factory work — “tends to be distributed almost ubiquitously over space,” while cognitive work “tends to concentrate in big cities.” And people, he argues, will move toward opportunity even when they’d rather not. He points to Canadians leaving Toronto for Miami: “They don’t necessarily like political conservatism. They don’t necessarily like Donald Trump. But they like that Miami is a nice place to live and offers low taxes and has a lot of economic opportunity.” People he meets in Nashville, where he now teaches, tell him “it’s good to live in a blue city in a red state. I pay less taxes.” When he wrote his book in 2002, he says, “I certainly didn’t talk about the rise of AI and AI technology and the way it would allow people to distribute.”

The cities receiving the talent have figured out a version of this: if the workers won’t move for a job, build the credential factories locally. Citadel founder Ken Griffin, who moved the hedge fund from Chicago to Miami in 2022, committed $3 billion to Carnegie Mellon University on Sept. 30, of which $2 billion funds a new Miami campus that plans to enroll its first students in 2028. Vanderbilt, whose faculty Florida joined this fall, is building a graduate campus in West Palm Beach focused on business, AI and data science, with $50 million from developer Stephen Ross leading the fundraising. Florida’s account of the South Florida migration is that the wealthy arrivals first “figured out they didn’t have to bring their companies with them. They could just bring their boats and their family office.” Griffin, he said, “realized that it has to be a talent anchor.”

Which is, in its way, the whole story in miniature. The billionaires are building credentials factories in the places they want to live. The consultants have measured the toll booths. The economists are confident the jobs will exist. And 11 million people are somewhere in the middle, being advised to show a bit more mobility.

## Sources

- [AI will create more jobs than it kills, McKinsey says—but 11m Americans may need new careers](https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/ai/articles/ai-create-more-jobs-kills-080000226.html) — finance.yahoo.com
- [AI will create more jobs than it kills, McKinsey says. The catch: 11 million Americans may need new careers](https://fortune.com/2026/10/03/ai-job-displacement-creation-new-careers-11-million-americans-workforce-mobility/) — fortune.com