The numbers don't lie (even when the boardroom does)

A fresh PYMNTS Intelligence report titled The Resilience Deficit: Labor Workers in an Automated Economy landed this week, and it’s genuinely one of the most important data drops of 2026 that most people will scroll past.

Here’s the headline finding that should make your jaw drop: 37% of U.S. hourly workers say their employer rolled out new AI or automation tools in the last 12 months.

We’re not talking about Silicon Valley coders sipping cold brew and vibing with ChatGPT. We’re talking about the real backbone of the country: people working in warehouses, restaurants, hotels, logistics hubs, and caregiving facilities. Everyday jobs, everyday people, and yet AI just casually showed up at their clock-in stations.

These workers fall into what PYMNTS calls the Labor Economy, which is defined as hourly workers earning up to $25 an hour and generally less than $50,000 a year. That covers roughly 60 million American adults and about 15% of U.S. annual GDP.

The Reality Check: When a group this massive wobbles, the entire economy feels the earthquake.

Here’s where the story gets genuinely alarming. Of the workers who said their employer introduced AI tools in the past year, nearly 60% received absolutely no training on how to use them. Zero. Not even a lazy YouTube tutorial link buried in a corporate email. Only 42% said they received any sort of instruction at all.

And when workers were asked whether they felt confident they could find a comparable-paying job if AI eliminated their current role? Only 39% said yes. That’s less than four in 10 people feeling even remotely secure about their future.

To make matters worse, job security confidence among these workers fell to its lowest recorded level since October just this past April. The anxiety is not some hypothetical future threat; it’s measurable, it’s real, and it’s actively getting worse.

The report also flagged something financially sobering: Labor Economy workers are far less likely than higher earners to have an emergency savings cushion to fall back on during a disruption. They are also much more likely to say they would need government assistance if their hours were cut. One in four explicitly stated they would have to pick up extra gig work just to compensate, which tells you everything about the resilience these workers are being forced to build entirely on their own.

Meanwhile, Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon published an opinion piece in The New York Times this weekend, and his message was essentially: everyone just breathe.

Solomon pushed back hard on what he called "doomsayer" narratives about mass unemployment. He argued that AI is simply the latest chapter in a long history of technological disruption, sitting right alongside electricity, the digital revolution, and the humble spreadsheet. His grand framing? This is just "creative destruction" at work, not a structural collapse of the workforce.

Citing internal Goldman Sachs analysis, Solomon acknowledged that AI could automate roughly 25% of current work hours over the next decade. But, he argued, that will not mean equivalent job losses. Instead, he predicted a beautiful reallocation of human time toward more complex, strategic, and relationship-driven responsibilities.

Goldman's analysts also pointed to AI-driven demand in areas like data center construction and infrastructure, which the bank estimates has supported hundreds of thousands of U.S. jobs since 2022. Solomon's vision sees three big forces shaping the transition:

Under this framework, firms like Goldman are already shifting hiring toward investment banking, trading, and asset management, where human relationships and judgment still reign supreme.

The catch? Solomon's own op-ed quietly acknowledged that entry-level and junior roles are already under immense pressure, as AI tools handle the financial modeling, note-taking, and spreadsheet work that used to be the bread and butter of young analysts just starting out.

So even in the most optimistic version of this corporate story, someone is absorbing the disruption first. And spoiler: it is not the people sitting in the corner offices at the top.

So Who Is Actually Right?

Here’s the tension nobody wants to say out loud. Solomon is not exactly wrong about history. Historically, technology has created more jobs than it has destroyed over the long run. The spreadsheet did not end accounting, and the ATM did not end banking. Those are fair and real examples.

But the PYMNTS data surfaces something that long-run optimism tends to completely skip right over: the short run is where real people actually live.

Right now, in the short run, a restaurant worker or a logistics staffer is staring at a brand-new AI tool they were never trained to use. They are feeling financially exposed and wondering whether the thriving economy that Solomon describes from his corporate view will ever actually reach their bank account.

The report does offer a sliver of genuine hope. Many affected workers say AI has not completely upended their daily roles yet, which means the window for intervention is still wide open. Employers, FinTech firms, banks, and payroll providers all have a genuine opportunity right now to step in with training programs and financial safety nets before the disruption deepens.

And that’s exactly why we’re doing something about it

We read this data, and we are not just going to nod, sigh, and move on to the next article. Starting this week, we're dropping a series of practical AI training videos designed to help everyday people, not just executives and engineers, actually understand how to work with AI tools, navigate them confidently, and use them to their advantage rather than fear them.

Because here’s the ultimate truth: more AI is coming. That part is absolutely not up for debate. But whether you get left behind or get ahead of the curve? That part is entirely up to you. We intend to make sure you have every single tool you need to choose the latter.

Knowing how to handle these tools is not a nice-to-have bonus anymore; it is your new competitive edge. The workers who thrive through this transition will not just be the ones who were lucky enough to have employers who cared. They will be the ones who took matters into their own hands and committed to learning.

And we’re going to be right there with you every step of the way.

Also, if you want to dig even deeper into today's story, the worker anxiety data, the Goldman Sachs debate, and what it all actually means for your career and your paycheck, we are breaking it all down on our YouTube channel later today. 

Come ready with your questions, because this conversation is long overdue!

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