How AI’s impact on value creation, jobs and productivity is coming into focus

Reskilling and upskilling employees for the AI era. Image: iStockphoto/skynesher
- Artificial intelligence (AI) transforms companies’ ability to apply intelligence, creating opportunities for innovative business models and new value pools.
- Recent research by PwC suggests that these benefits do not come at the expense of jobs.
- The responsibility for developing much-needed AI skills should be shared by organizations, policy-makers, educators and employees themselves.
Artificial intelligence (AI) puts a vast and tireless intelligence at our service, creating high hopes that AI can fuel economic growth and open the door to greater shared prosperity.
Our experience at PwC indicates that these hopes may be fulfilled. We’re finding that AI can drive a revolution in value creation that is good for organizations, good for workers and good for the economy.
AI is helping employees and organizations to harness new opportunities and achieve more than ever before. What’s more, this progress does not come at the expense of job numbers – on the contrary, people might be more in demand in the AI era.
A positive outlook for the AI era
PwC’s latest annual CEO survey shows that a significant majority of CEOs (70%) expect generative AI (GenAI) to transform how their company creates value. At the same time, 82% say that AI has increased or caused no change in headcount in the past year.
This is exactly what we are seeing in our work with clients as well. AI transforms companies’ ability to apply intelligence and information at speed and scale, enabling them to build new business models and tap different value pools. Pioneering companies in areas from AI-supported healthcare to AI-enabled mergers & acquisitions are using the technology to create breakthroughs in the value their people can deliver.
After all, AI is much more than a chatbot; it can revolutionize any activity that involves insight or decision-making, paving the way for business offerings and human achievements that were not possible before the AI era.
Investors also see the promise of AI. A full two-thirds of investors expect GenAI to deliver significant productivity gains within the next 12 months for the companies they invest in, with a similar number expecting that to positively impact the bottom line. Importantly, investors do not expect this boon to come at the expense of jobs – equal numbers expect headcount increases as decreases.
Turning to employees’ views, four out of five workers who use GenAI daily expect it to make their time at work more efficient. Our research shows that far more employees expect AI to have positive than negative impacts on their roles – from helping them learn new skills to enabling them to be more creative. Half of all workers who use GenAI expect the technology to lead to higher salaries. This suggests they feel AI can improve the value they deliver and increase the demand for staff.
Cross-sector benefits in the AI era
These CEO, investor and employee expectations are borne out by the facts. Sectors more able to use AI are seeing 4.8 times more productivity growth than other sectors. Job numbers are still growing in occupations most able to use AI, albeit more slowly than in the occupations that are least able.
Taken as a whole, these facts – and our experience with clients – suggest that organizations are using AI to create new value, whether by expanding into new markets, generating new products or accessing new customers. This in turn helps to generate demand for workers, create more valuable companies and increase prosperity for everyone.
We’ve been here before. In the past, new technologies, from the internal combustion engine to the internet, have enabled workers to do new things. This has created new job roles, products and services, and even industries, while growing prosperity for society as a whole.
How to deploy AI to create new value
So, what are the key steps to deploying AI to enable employees and organizations to create new value?
A new report from PwC and the World Economic Forum, Leveraging generative AI for job augmentation and workforce productivity, offers a critical insight: it depends as much or more on people as on the technology itself.
It’s important to build people's ability and desire to make the most of AI by, for example, creating a culture of curiosity, encouraging experimentation, rewarding innovation, demonstrating that AI can make work more enjoyable and rewarding, and modelling the right behaviours from the top.
All of us will spend the rest of our careers in the AI era, and it will certainly bring change to the jobs market and alter the skills people need to succeed. For example, the skills sought by employers in occupations most able to use AI are changing 25% faster than in other occupations.
Organizations, policy-makers, educators and employees themselves share responsibility for developing the skills to succeed in the AI era. Our findings suggest these efforts could be richly rewarded as AI-powered employees are more in demand and valuable than ever.
Ultimately, AI is a general-purpose technology with vast applications. Much like electricity, it augments what humanity can achieve. Our vision and creativity will determine how completely we can all realize its potential.
PwC refers to the PwC network and/or one or more of its member firms, each of which is a separate legal entity. Please see www.pwc.com/structure for further details. This content is for general information purposes only and should not be used as a substitute for consultation with professional advisors.
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February 6, 2025