AI's surprising impact on job creation and wages

Contrary to what some may fear, AI isn't eliminating jobs. It’s segmenting and reshaping them in fundamental ways that leaders and employees need to understand. This unexpected finding comes from PwC's recent AI Jobs Barometer report, which analysed more than one billion online job postings across six continents. 

At one end of the spectrum, AI is professionalising work, automating away routine processes and elevating the importance of human expertise, judgment, and creativity. For example, AI helps lawyers with basic duties like document summarisation, leaving them with tougher tasks like building a case in court. In our analysis, these kinds of advertised jobs (such as radiologists, employment recruiters, and air traffic controllers) comprise about 22% of the total. 

At the other end, AI is democratising work, reducing the skill barriers for complex tasks and shifting roles toward less specialised activities. Consider inventory clerks. AI now performs complex projects like managing inventory, leaving people less expert tasks like moving stock in warehouses. Other democratised jobs include roles like software developers, loan officers, and finance managers. This group makes up 52% of advertised jobs. (The roughly one-fourth of jobs not democratised or professionalised have low exposure to AI.) 

This divergence is creating two tracks in the labour market with markedly different outcomes. The jobs that are being professionalised are growing twice as fast as democratised jobs and seeing 42% higher wage growth since 2021.

The clear lesson for both business leaders and workers: winning isn’t just about using technology; it’s about human skills. The more AI is deployed, the more distinctly human expertise is valued. For organisations, the focus should be on redesigning work, not just automating tasks. Individuals must hone their leadership, judgment, creative, and teamwork skills so they can do what AI can’t.

Next steps for business leaders:

Shape workforce strategy. Use a professionalised/democratised lens to guide talent investment and skills development while anticipating attrition pressures. Professionalised roles may require deeper investment in advanced AI fluency, human-intensive skills, specialist talent, and retention strategies as demand and wage pressure rises. Democratised roles may require proactive work redesign, mobility pathways, and refreshed career propositions as AI changes the expertise required.

Reinvent early career pathways. Map junior roles that increasingly demand senior-level capabilities. Redesign onboarding, mentorship, and training programmes to accelerate development of advanced skills like leadership, stakeholder management, and strategic decision-making.

Invest in human-intensive skills alongside AI skills. Empathy, judgment, creativity, and leadership become more competitively valuable as AI absorbs routine and technical tasks. Building a workforce with these capabilities is as strategically important as developing workers’ AI proficiency.

Next steps for workers:

Consider moving toward roles made more expert by AI. Our analysis suggests that career opportunities are migrating from democratised roles toward professionalised and low-AI-exposure roles (with exceptions).

Seek out pioneering companies and industries. Look for companies that are using AI to create new markets or services, or who are partnering across traditional industry lines to invent the new businesses of the future.

Build human-intensive skills. Hone the skills with rising value in an AI era, such as creativity, people skills, leadership, judgment, and the ability to navigate complexity and ambiguity.