Two futures for Channel Islands jobs in a new AI era

PwC’s recently released 2026 Global AI Jobs Barometer looked at more than a billion job adverts from across the world and found that AI is creating a two-track labour market. In this blog, our Lead Economist Christie Viljoen reflects on the key messages and implications of this global research for the Channel Islands.

AI is professionalising some jobs by automating routine tasks and elevating the importance of human expertise, judgement and creativity. Meanwhile, AI is democratising other jobs by taking over more complex tasks and shifting human roles toward less specialised activities. This divergence is likely happening right now in the Channel Islands. How is your business responding?

A two-track labour market

The emergence of an AI-enabled two-track labour market is perhaps not surprising in the Channel Islands. In 2020, our Upskilling the Channel Islands’ workforce for a digital world report signalled that AI tools would reshape island jobs in different directions. For example:

Our research identified local jobs associated with anti-money laundering (AML) and customer due diligence that were primed for what we now call professionalisation. In these roles, automation speeds up verification, whilst biometric and other AI-enabled analysis makes it easier to identify discrepancies and tackle risks. For AML and CDD workers, this leaves more time for tasks where bespoke investigations and complex judgement is required.
In turn, our research also found some tasks at financial services companies – such as performance evaluation and asset allocation decisions – were en route to being democratised. Here, AI tools are taking over more complex, data-intensive processes like risk modelling and autonomous portfolio rebalancing. This leaves fund industry workers with more time for strategy and client-facing relationship management tasks, and lowers barriers to entry into these roles.

AI is having two different impacts on Channel Islands jobs depending on whether it is automating more or less expert tasks:

Globally, 52% of jobs are being
DEMOCRATISED
(shifted toward less expert tasks)

Example: Portfolio manager

AI automated
More expert tasks like risk modelling, asset allocations, and regulatory monitoring

Remain
Less expert tasks like training junior staff, client relationship building and stakeholder meetings

Globally, 22% of jobs are being
PROFESSIONALISED
(shifted toward more expert tasks)

Example: Legal advisor

Remain
More expert tasks like building legal cases and presenting these in court

AI automated
Less expert tasks like researching case law, document summarisation, and taking meeting notes

What does this mean for skills planning?

This two-track perspective creates a lens through which we can view the future of financial services and other jobs in the Channel Islands. It raises key questions about how we look at AI and associated skills in Guernsey and Jersey.

Let’s look at four key insights from PwC’s 2026 Global AI Jobs Barometer:

Companies are accelerating their investment in AI systems and the people who build, run, and optimise them.

Across the world, hiring of AI specialists (workers with advanced AI skills like machine learning) grew eight times faster in 2025 than hiring in general.

AI specialist hiring is rising in every sector. 5.4% of job listings in the Financial Services sector were for AI specialists in 2025, up from 3.4% in the previous year.

Channel Islands companies must rethink how they invest in AI capabilities. Those who are not actively spending money on AI tools and people with the right skills risk falling behind rapidly.

Entry level jobs highly exposed to AI are evolving to require traditionally more senior capabilities as core functions.

In fact, the most AI-exposed entry level jobs are now seven times more likely to require senior skills than the least AI-exposed ones.

These senior skills demand EQ, judgment, leadership and other abilities at a level not historically required in many junior roles. Junior jobs are being seniorised.

Channel Islands companies must rethink how they train, mentor, and scaffold early career pathways to help junior / entry-level workers build and demonstrate senior skills much earlier than previously expected.

Professionalised and democratised jobs clearly require (different sets of) AI skills.

But even jobs with a low level of AI exposure – think chefs, construction workers and mechanics – require sufficient AI skills to engage with other workers that are more exposed to AI.

At the same time, companies are struggling to secure these skills. As at end 2025, some 85% of Channel Islands companies said they do not have sufficient access to AI expertise, according to the PwC Channel Islands CEO Survey 2026.

Channel Islands companies must rethink how they develop the AI skills internally that they cannot find externally.

There is a positive correlation between AI exposure and net skills change over time, indicating that more AI-exposed occupations tend to see greater shifts in skill requirements.

Skills required for the most AI exposed jobs were in 2025 changing twice as fast as in the least exposed roles – this could be even faster in 2026.

This suggests that AI-exposed roles are adapting more rapidly, with evolving task demands reshaping the capabilities required.

Channel Islands companies must rethink their career framework - from performance, progression to how they incentivise skills acquisition – to effectively upskill their existing workforce.

The imperative for reshaping career pathways from the entry point

The key message from these four key insights is that Channel Islands companies need to fundamentally redesign their investment in talent, training and career strategies to build AI capabilities and accelerate workforce upskilling - especially for entry-level workers. Financial services are among the most exposed to this imperative for change: traditional models for developing entry-level workers are no longer fit for purpose.

Some of these redesigns could result in fewer entry-level jobs, or a slowing pace of growth in demand for new recruits. A careful approach is needed: entry-level jobs are the foundation of the workforce and companies’ future talent pipelines. Entry-level staff are the future middle management employees; AI will not change that.

At a societal level, PwC’s latest global collaboration with the World Economic Forum (Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Entry-Level Work) makes it clear that strong entry-level pathways matter for economic mobility, civic participation, and the broad-based prosperity that sustains stable, cohesive communities. These are key points in the blueprints for the future of both Guernsey and Jersey’s finance industries.

This is just the beginning

AI capability continues to grow at speed. In the first half of 2026, advancements in software and hardware capabilities have significantly accelerated the pace of AI transformation. According to the latest estimates by the UK’s AI Security Institute (AISI), the length of tasks that AI models could complete with 80% reliability has doubled every 4.7 months since late-2024 when reasoning models emerged.

In other words, AI models can now do double the work even since research was completed for PwC’s Global AI Jobs Barometer a few months ago. There is a lag before this shows up in jobs and roles in our local market.

At a practical level, we expect advances in AI over the past several months will further exacerbate the trends in professionalisation and democratisation of jobs across the Channel Islands. Portfolio managers, for example, will put AI in charge of a bigger volume of expert tasks like risk modelling to the benefit of having more time for stakeholder interactions. And legal advisors can get their less expert tasks like researching case law completed much quicker than before – accelerating their case building process.

At the current speed of AI capability growth, the conversation about which jobs are being professionalised and which are being democratised could change quickly. Globally, the number of advertised AI specialist jobs shot up in the last year, growing eight times faster than jobs as a whole. That number could be much larger by 2027.

This, in turn, could result in even greater adoption of GenAI and other AI technologies in, for example, operational, administrative, and compliance activities. Fewer people may ultimately be needed to perform AML/CDD functions.

Supporting the competitiveness of our island economies

Both Guernsey and Jersey published action plans in early-2026 aimed at strengthening the competitiveness of their financial sectors in support of economic prosperity. As discussed in our recent blog Catalysing finance industry competitiveness in the Channel Islands, both reports link competitiveness to a tech‑fluent workforce and to cultural shifts that prioritise both growth and customer experience.

PwC Channel Islands is supporting Guernsey's AI Sprint* planned for October-November 2026. This is a bold, forward-thinking initiative driving technology adoption. It highlights the power of uniting industry, government and the community to turn ambitious ideas into reality.

*^{_{Guernsey's AI Sprint}}

AI gives us the potential to plug resource and skills gaps, and upskill employees into higher value work and to strengthen productivity and innovation. With the right skills, agility and readiness to embrace change, our island economies have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to create new jobs to make up for the ones that will be lost or reshaped due to technological change.

As we heard at PwC’s 2026 Channel Islands Summer Client Events: AI is here to stay. At the same time, our Channel Islands CEO Survey 2026 showed that 58% of Channel Islands business leaders are concerned about whether their companies are transforming fast enough to keep up with technology developments like AI.

This concern should move into action. Lagging in tech transformation, and falling behind competitors using AI to deliver the same regulated services with materially fewer hours, lower costs, and shorter turnaround times, is probably a greater risk than human workers being replaced by AI tools.

The art of moving in the right direction and at the right speed is, of course, sector dependent. Here are some relevant sector-specific insights for Channel Islands organisations from analysis of PwC’s 2026 Global AI Jobs Barometer:

Financial Services has the highest exposure to AI out of the major economic sectors, with a large share of roles containing tasks that can be replaced or augmented by AI.

This high exposure also helps explain the strong growth in the sector’s hiring for AI jobs, both globally and in the Channel Islands, making Financial Services particularly well-positioned to integrate AI at scale.

Globally, the global number of AI jobs in Financial Services increased by 77.4% in 2025 and could grow by an even larger margin in 2026. This sharp increase shows that commercial AI adoption is moving from the experimental stage toward embedded and practical deployment across the sector, with a strong focus on trusted and explainable AI in regulated entities.

In the Channel Islands, Financial Services companies need to make sure they are not falling behind their peers – both in the region and competitor territories – in AI adoption. Commercial AI adoption is moving beyond the experimental stage toward embedded and practical deployment.

Globally, the number of AI jobs in Professional Services increased by 54.7% in 2025 and could continue notably higher in 2026. This places Professional Services close to Financial Services in terms of their AI hiring share, and the highest of sectors where digital services are not the core product offering.

The scale of the increase indicates that AI is becoming increasingly embedded in core service delivery models and productivity strategies.

Given the knowledge-based nature of Professional Services roles, AI-driven augmentation and automation are likely significant contributors to skills reconfiguration. Professional Services is among the most rapidly evolving sectors in terms of workforce capabilities.

In the Channel Islands, Professional Services companies need to embed AI in their service delivery workflows. The high and rising AI intensity in this sector makes it clear that AI augmentation is happening across advisory, analytical and client-facing functions.

In 2025, AI roles in the Government and Public Sector accounted for only 2.7% of total global job postings in the sector. The skills evolution in the sector appears more gradual compared to many other sectors, likely reflecting institutional constraints, longer implementation cyclesand structured workforce frameworks.

In healthcare, for example, AI-related roles account for just 0.9% of total job postings globally, the lowest share among all sectors analysed.

However, amid overall hiring restraint, the public sector has meaningful scope to expand AI integration across administrative, analytical and service-delivery functions like healthcare.

In the Channel Islands, Government and Public Sector entities need to look at adoption, deployment and use of AI tools across existing workflows. International experience shows that AI integration in the public sector yields strong improvements in output per employee relative to other sectors.

Financial Services' status as the most AI-exposed major industry is particularly relevant because of the sector's outsized economic importance in the Channel Islands. In Jersey, for example, finance provides £6 in every £10 of tax revenue.

The elusive AI Return On Investment (ROI)

None of these moves come cheap. Our Decoding ROI from AI report found that, at a global level, AI spending is pervasive. And in many cases, companies are spending just to keep up with their competitors.

However, the return on AI investment is far less pervasive so far, with 20% of organisations capturing 74% of AI’s economic value to date. We see similar findings for our islands as well. While the PwC Channel Islands CEO Survey 2025 found that almost 60% of Channel Islands CEOs expected AI to boost returns in the future, this year’s edition found that only 8% of business leaders have so far reported both higher revenues and lower costs from AI.

This does not mean that ROI is unobtainable. Far from it. But what separates AI leaders from the rest is what we have come to define as “AI fitness”: the ability to point AI at what matters, build fit-for-purpose foundations, and embed AI throughout the enterprise. Higher AI fitness levels improve a broad set of intermediate performance outcomes that, in turn, shape financial results and ROI.

When companies with strong AI foundations increase AI use, they see nearly double the improvement in AI-driven performance compared to those that have weaker foundations.

The most AI fit companies have strong foundational capabilities, including the right workforce skills, modernised tech, high data quality, and governance and risk management. In effect, foundations raise the conversion rate from AI activity to measurable financial outcomes. However, our Channel Islands CEO Survey 2026 found that only 15% of local company CEOs believe they so far have the all the right foundations for AI in place.

A call to action: Six helpful questions for reflection

So, what’s the next step? Below we set out six key questions for Channel Islands business leaders to consider as you seek to understand your foundations for AI excellence and, at a more granular level, the future of job roles in your organisations:

How is AI changing the level of human expertise required in professionalised and democratised jobs in your company? How does this influence your planning and recruiting of staff, in particular entry-level workers?

How might demand for a specific job – and the supply of workers to fill it - change as AI reshapes the role? What impact does this have on your current employees and their career planning?

Where is human involvement needed to oversee or assist AI, for example to check the quality of AI’s output or manage atypical cases? And how does this change over time due to AI’s increasing capabilities?

What could your staff composition look like in one, three, and five years from now? What happens to the traditional career ladder and talent pipeline when jobs are fundamentally changing?

How do external forces - from business process bottlenecks to regulation - constrain or affect the use of AI? How do you ensure trust, consistency and explainability in your use of AI?

How is your AI roadmap developing? What is delaying the creation of a top-down, enterprise-wide strategic AI approach for your company and your people?

AI represents a significant opportunity to rethink how you can create value and how this is delivered. Organisations that do not move as fast as the technology are ripe for disruption. So, take a proportionate approach, focusing on where it can transform your businesses. As seen several times across history, the division of work between people and machines is once again fundamentally shifting. This time, we are just more acutely aware of the unfolding changes.

Here at PwC Channel Islands, we can help you wherever you are on your journey, with full technology and AI design and implementation capabilities. Please reach out if you would like a chat.