• Reach across the divide. A small group of AI-enabled, high-demand workers is racing ahead, while the core workforce (56%)—your business’s engine room—has less access to AI, learning, and opportunity.
• Rewire work to capture the ROI of AI. Nearly two-thirds of workers now use AI—and daily use has grown by more than 50%—but adoption alone won’t deliver returns. Redesign roles, workflows, and incentives.
• Build the capability to execute change. Workers are upskilling fast, but development access is falling, trust has weakened, and managers are stretched—putting reinvention at risk.

PwC’s Global Workforce Hopes and Fears Survey 2026 reveals a stark divergence in a fast-changing workplace. On one side, an optimistic minority group of AI-enabled front-runners who are motivated, adaptive, and ready to advance—within or beyond their organisations. On the other, an anxious majority group of core workers who worry about their jobs and finances, feel shut out of growth and learning, and distrust their leaders.

This diverging workforce presents employers with a complicated challenge. Front-runner workers are proving to be more agile and adaptive than their organisations, many of which continue to reward caution over innovation. Nearly a third of these confident, can-do workers say they are very likely to change employers in the next 12 months.

The core workforce, though—the engine room of delivery—feels unsettled by change, left behind in the AI race, unsupported to upskill, and poorly led by their managers. They are experiencing a crisis of trust. Across our global sample of nearly 50,000 workers, trust in management has fallen by seven percentage points year-on-year.

Our research suggests that, even as organisations invest heavily into AI, leaders aren’t doing enough to help workers and managers navigate change, build new skills, and translate technology into innovation and value. PwC’s Global CEO Survey finds that most CEOs say their companies aren’t yet seeing a financial return from investments in AI.

Injecting AI into legacy operating models isn’t enough. To unlock sustained advantage, organisations need to rewire work. That makes workforce transformation a business and economic imperative. The return on technology investment increasingly depends on whether organisations can redesign work, build capabilities, and translate new technology into productivity, innovation, and growth.

This year’s Global Workforce Hopes and Fears Survey highlights three key actions that can help leaders get started:

• Make tough choices to engage a divided workforce

• Rewire work to translate AI into value 

• Empower workers—and managers—to embrace change and build new skills.

Make tough choices to engage a divided workforce

In this year’s survey, we assessed workers’ “AI advantage”—the extent to which AI has boosted the quality of their work, their creativity and skills, and their value to their employer. We also assessed respondents’ perception of the market demand for their skills and experience, and how difficult it would be for employers to develop or acquire workers with their skills.

This analysis sorts workers into four distinct cohorts. ‘Front-runners’ (14% of the workforce) bring strong AI advantage and high-demand capabilities. The ‘engine room’ (56% of the total) bring dependable delivery, but this majority group feel increasingly squeezed. Between these two extremes are ‘AI insurgents,’ who bring ambition and energy, and ‘the indispensables,’ who bring valued, field-specific expertise but low engagement with AI.

The contrast with the larger engine room cohort is telling. This majority of workers are key to organisational delivery, but they have limited access to learning, innovation, and meaningful AI use. They are the least likely of the four cohorts to say they feel ready to adapt, while only half feel confident about their job security. Their experience drives a striking overall finding of this year’s survey: twice as many workers think their bargaining power has fallen over the last three years than think it has risen. 

The engine room workers are also stretched financially. Only a third believe they are fairly paid, and even fewer say they can pay their bills and have something left over at the end of the month. Their situation drives worsening financial strain across the global workforce—only 34% of workers can pay bills with some money left over, a decline of eight percentage points since last year. Almost two-thirds of all workers (62%) say the cost of living has had a moderate or major impact on them at work in the last year. 

Rewire work to translate AI into value 

AI adoption is on the rise. Nearly two in three workers (64%) report using AI at work in the past 12 months—a ten-point increase year-on-year. The proportion of the workforce using GenAI daily has increased from 14% to 22% in the same timeframe. And the trend is likely to continue, with 59% of workers expecting their use of AI tools in their job to increase over the next 12 months. These workers feel energised and empowered by AI use.

Among the front-runner cohort, more than half use GenAI daily (51%), compared to just 11% of the core workforce. In fact, the majority of the core workforce say they have never used AI. These disparities are deepening the workforce divide, as AI adoption is associated with a more positive employee experience. Daily GenAI users report significantly higher confidence in their job security than other workers, with 68% feeling very or extremely confident in their job security. This assurance is well founded, PwC’s 2026 AI Jobs Barometer finds workers with AI skills now command a 62% wage premium, up from 57% in 2025.  

Daily users of GenAI are clearly applying the technology to professionalise their roles. Of daily users, 34% say that using AI helps them be better at some of the most complex and difficult parts of their job, compared to 29% of AI users overall. 

Higher adoption doesn’t mean blind trust, though. The more workers understand AI, the more discerning they become about where and how to use it. Daily GenAI users are familiar with the current pitfalls and fallibilities of AI, and accordingly are alert to AI’s limits. Nearly a third (31%) of daily AI users report their top barrier to AI use as having  concerns about accuracy or quality (six percentage points higher than the global average).  

Your next move

Organisations need to translate workers’ enthusiastic embrace of AI into value, not just by driving adoption, but by rewiring work itself. PwC’s AI Performance Study finds that just 20% of companies capture 74% of AI-driven returns. These leading firms are 1.9 times as likely to create performance incentives that encourage employees to experiment with and use AI in their work; 1.7 times as likely to provide ongoing, role-based AI learning; and 2.2 times as likely to redesign workflows to incorporate AI, rather than simply adding AI tools. The prize? The most AI-fit companies achieve 7.2 times higher AI-driven performance than all others.

The energy and empowerment reported by AI-fluent workers is an opportunity. Organisations that drive adoption where relevant, paired with a culture of innovation and experimentation, stand to multiply the benefit. As PwC’s recent CEO Survey Snapshot shows, companies that combine AI capability with human judgment will be better placed to test options and deliver value faster. AI adoption creates the greatest value not when organisations simply deploy more tools, agents, or pilots, but when they redesign work, roles, and operating models around uniquely human contribution and trusted human–AI collaboration.

Among cohorts that lag behind in AI use, organisations can support greater adoption and impact where roles allow for it. For example, they can encourage established workers in the indispensables cohort to experiment with AI and turn their proven expertise into new sources of value.

Companies that treat AI as a series of isolated tools may find it harder to turn use (and costs) into value. 

Empower workers—and managers—to embrace change and build new skills

As organisations navigate major change, workers and managers are often struggling to keep up. 

Among workers affected by change, 34% strongly or moderately agree that they experienced more change in the last year than in previous years. One in five workers say they find it difficult to manage change, and 18% don’t understand the reasons for the change. At the same time, fatigue and burnout remain a significant workforce challenge, cited by 27% of workers as a key limit to productivity. When considering the biggest risks to job security, more workers cite economic volatility (57%) than AI taking on more tasks (44%), with Gen Z more anxious across all these metrics compared to other generations.

A cohort lens on these findings reveals some surprising insights. The front-runner cohort is experiencing change at a greater pace than other workers. Two-thirds of these AI-enabled, high-demand workers say they have experienced faster change than in previous years, and most say they have applied new skills, learnt new tools, increased their workload, and seen their daily responsibilities and team structure change. This group feels motivated and optimistic, but nearly half of them say they find it difficult to manage change—a message leaders should pay attention to.

Learning is now part of the job, reflecting the rapid pace of change in workplaces. Almost all workers (88%) say they have applied new skills in their job over the past year, with 40% saying this was to a large or very large extent. Nearly two-thirds of workers (64%) had to learn new tools and technology for their job over the past year to at least a moderate extent, with 36% saying this was to a large or very large extent.

As is to be expected, AI-enabled workers have upskilled the fastest. PwC’s AI Jobs Barometer finds that the skills that employers seek in the occupations most exposed to AI are changing more than twice as fast as in the least exposed occupations.

Despite this, workers rate their access to learning and development resources (51%, down from 59% last year) and their understanding of the future skills required (49%) lower than their own capacity to develop skills (61%). Again, a cohort lens underlines the challenge. Less than 40% of the engine room cohort say they have access to learning and development resources, compared to nearly 80% of front-runners.

Leaders and managers, who must guide the workforce through change and rekindle trust and hope, are finding their own jobs stressful. They are more likely than the workers below them to report strain and lack of clarity around these shifts. Our research shows 31% of senior executives and 24% of managers find it difficult to manage change. The data also suggests that managers face a distinct set of pressures as they seek to engage their teams and avoid fragmentation. Confidence in their job security is down six points year-on-year, even as there is little change amongst more junior roles. 

Your next move

As the business landscape shifts fast, staying competitive requires reinvention, not just optimisation. Organisations must rethink how they create, capture, and deliver value—unlocking new revenue streams, redefining customer experiences, and shaping innovative digital products and services.

But a reinvention strategy is only as executable as the workforce behind it. As organisations pursue new sources of growth and develop AI-enabled business models, workforce capacity, capabilities, and confidence can become either an accelerator of strategy or a constraint on it.

Managers need to navigate complex change for themselves as well as for those on their team. Helping them build resilience can strengthen their ability to overcome obstacles, adapt to change, and more effectively lead their teams. PwC’s 29th Global CEO Survey shows that the organisations moving fastest to reinvent through AI, innovation, and new operating models are outperforming their peers. Reinvention succeeds when organisations move at pace, and ensure their workforce have the capacity and confidence to match that pace. It’s essential that workers and managers understand how change affects their roles, have access to the skills needed to adapt, and trust leadership to navigate uncertainty.

The reality of a diverging workforce heightens the challenge for leaders. Most front-runner workers are using AI every day, learning new skills, and backing themselves to grow, lead, and prosper. If their organisations don’t keep up with them, they’ll quickly move on to more innovative, rewarding workplaces. At the same time, leaders must urgently attend to the deep mistrust and strain experienced by the majority of the workforce, who serve customers and run operations. These workers need space to learn, support from their managers, and belief in their future.