AI Is Supposed to Cut Jobs. Australia Just Added 76,300 of Them. Here’s What’s Actually Happening.
This morning, Goldman Sachs warned that 35 major ASX-listed companies — NAB, Coles, JB Hi-Fi, and others — are sitting on a labour cost problem that AI is about to make more acute. This afternoon, the ABS published June 2026 labour force data showing Australia added 76,300 jobs in a single month.
Both things are true at once, and that is the actual picture.
The Goldman Story
The 7NEWS report published today details a Goldman Sachs analysis of ASX-listed companies where labour costs have grown faster than revenue, outpacing sales by more than 10% since 2022. NAB alone sits at 30% of net sales going to labour costs. That kind of maths gets CFOs very interested in anything that automates work.
Goldman also flagged something worth watching: “AI-washing.” Some companies, the report suggests, are reaching for AI as a public justification for cuts that were coming anyway. Labour overhang from a post-pandemic hiring spree, slowing revenue, was always going to produce restructuring. AI is a convenient headline.
That does not mean AI pressure is not real at the corporate level. It absolutely is. Goldman noted AI is “top of mind” for large companies scrutinising their costs, with 1-5% of IT budgets now going to AI tokens alone.
The ABS Story
June 2026 labour force data tells a different story at the macro level:
- 76,300 jobs added (seasonally adjusted)
- Full-time: +29,300 | Part-time: +47,000
- Unemployment rate: 4.4%, up 0.1 percentage points — but only because more Australians entered the workforce
- Participation rate: 67.0% (up 0.3 percentage points)
- Total employed: 14,823,300 people
That unemployment tick-up signals labour market confidence: people who had stopped looking for work are looking again. That is a tight market, not a broken one.
Two Economies, One Country
Large listed companies and small businesses are not living through the same AI moment.
For a 500-person publicly traded company with a bloated cost structure, AI is a lever for cutting headcount. The pressure is real, visible in the quarterly numbers, and now flagged by Goldman. That story belongs on the business pages.
For most small businesses, the dynamic is different. Research from NAB found that 40% of Australian SMEs using AI are seeing genuine productivity gains, doing more with the staff they have, not replacing those staff. The government’s own multi-year review of AI and employment, covered here, found no clean correlation between AI adoption and job losses at the smaller end of the economy.
Yes, disruption is already underway, particularly in roles that involve repetitive knowledge work. But that disruption is showing up as role reshaping, not mass redundancies, in most small business contexts.
What This Means for You
If you run a small or medium business, the Goldman report is relevant background, not a direct signal about your workforce. Your context is different from NAB’s.
The sharper question: are you using AI to grow capacity, or holding off entirely while competitors are not?
The 76,300 jobs added last month did not appear because AI stopped. They appeared in an economy where businesses kept hiring, kept expanding, kept finding things that needed doing. Some of those businesses are almost certainly using AI to handle work that would otherwise require another hire.
That is a competitive position, not a threat.
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