Economic and technological transformation is creating uneven opportunity, and the consequences are already visible. None of these issues can be solved in isolation – they require cross-sector, systems-level thinking and cooperation.
This is part of a series of Connecting the Dots articles from the World Economic Forum, exploring how the defining challenges of our era – related to technology, people, the planet, economic growth and geopolitics – are deeply and practically interconnected.
Somewhere on a headset right now, someone is coming to the end of a shift – handling password resets, chasing deliveries and calming angry customers – conversations increasingly dealt with by AI. With a live, complex human call costing $6 to $12 compared to as little as 25 cents for a routine, AI-handled interaction, the drive for efficiency is reshaping jobs and career paths beyond customer service, raising questions about how greater productivity can translate into wider economic opportunity.
Who benefits from this transformation depends on more than technological progress. Access to education and training, good health and affordable care all shape people’s ability to enter work, build careers and navigate change. For businesses and governments, expanding opportunity means addressing these conditions alongside efforts to generate growth: who gets to share in this transformation, who is left carrying its costs and what support do people need to navigate it?
Five interconnected areas – where skills, care, health and national policy intersect – show how we can widen access to opportunity in a changing economy.
How can people prepare for changing work?
Technology is reshaping what a job looks like faster than education and training systems can respond. Millions of people are in roles that will look fundamentally different within a decade; however, the pathways to the next version of their career are often inaccessible, unaffordable, or simply don't exist yet.
The call centre story above is one particularly visible example; similar shifts are underway in areas like logistics, retail, junior legal work and basic accounting, with entry-level roles particularly affected. The WEF finds that more than a third of 15- to 24-year-old workers are in occupations with “medium to high exposure to AI-driven task change” – a ranking that measures the degree of task overlap with AI capabilities rather than predicted job losses.
Entry-level roles are usually the first rung on a career ladder, so when those tasks change faster than training can adapt, the route into work narrows – one reason economists are urging policymakers and tech leaders to act now to prepare for AI’s impact. Businesses feel the same gap through talent shortages, as does the green transition, which needs new categories of skilled workers.
Reskilling is part of the solution. More than 350 organizations across 79 economies are now working through the Forum's Reskilling Revolution, which is on track to provide more than 850 million people with better access to skills, education and job pathways by 2030 thanks to pledges made by organizations taking part. On the ground, national accelerators within the network have already supported 14.8 million people with tailored learning and career pathways, demonstrating how policy and industry can deliver measurable progress.
How can worker shortages and a lack of opportunity coexist?
The average age of a farmer in Japan in 2023 was almost 69, with around 80% of farmers over 65. Beyond agriculture, the country’s IT, nursing, construction, hospitality, and food and beverage sectors face critical talent shortages.
Japan's ageing population is well documented, but it’s a story playing out across the planet, as the number of people over 60 heads towards 2.1 billion by 2050. Wealthier economies typically have advanced healthcare systems that enable people to live longer, healthier lives after retirement. At the same time, birth rates are falling, and stricter immigration rules are unlikely to make up the shortfall, while technology and the energy transition require new job skills.
Meanwhile, many emerging economies with young, fast-growing populations struggle to create enough opportunity for the people they already have. Jobseekers and employers do not automatically find each other: skills mismatches, distance, a lack of digital access and migration rules can all keep them apart.
Some countries are building those connections deliberately. In 2024, Germany and Kenya signed a migration and mobility partnership that includes skills development and protections for Kenyan workers, and German officials say it is already leading to more employment-related visas. Under the Global Skill Partnership model developed by the Center for Global Development, the destination country helps fund training in the country of origin, and trainees choose whether to migrate or stay and work locally.
How can workers share in the benefits of economic change?
In Singapore, a cleaner or security officer who completes recognized training moves up a wage ladder agreed by unions, employers and government. The Progressive Wage Model, introduced in 2014, now covers more than 155,000 lower-wage workers, and real incomes at the 20th percentile grew 5.9% between 2019 and 2024, ahead of median wage growth of 3.6%, according to the National Trades Union Congress.
These arrangements matter because the gains from new technology do not reach workers automatically. Modelling by MIT economist Daron Acemoglu suggests AI is likely to widen the gap between capital and labour income, with productivity gains alone unlikely to lead to sizeable wage rises. Using AI to create new tasks for workers, rather than only automating existing ones, could change that, he argues.
How the costs of change are shared matters too. In 2023, more than a million people protested across France after the government moved to raise the retirement age from 62 to 64, a change roughly two-thirds of the public opposed. As populations age, societies face hard choices about who contributes more and what security they can expect in return.
When productivity gains translate into better pay and living standards for workers, confidence in innovation grows. Conversely, when workers feel excluded from these gains, public backing for long-term investment, trade, and economic reform weakens – shaping domestic priorities in ways that ripple into international relations, as we note in our Connecting the Dots article on Geopolitics.
How do care and health affect people’s ability to work?
In the UK, millions of people are waiting for NHS hospital treatment, and although backlogs have eased slightly from recent record highs, they remain a major burden on daily life for patients and staff. Care systems worldwide face similar issues: schools, hospitals and care homes are short of workers, funding and capacity at a time when demand for their services is rising.
Those waits have a direct bearing on work. Around 2.8 million working-age people in the UK are economically inactive because of long-term sickness, and an ONS survey found 35% of over-50s who had left a job because of a health condition were on an NHS waiting list. Unpaid care responsibilities, meanwhile, keep 708 million women and 40 million men worldwide out of the labour market, making it harder to stay in work or retrain.
Targeting treatment where it matters for work can help. The UK’s Further Faster 20 programme sent specialist teams to hospital trusts in the areas with the highest economic inactivity, and waiting lists for working-age adults there fell more than five times faster than the national average.
These pressures are increasingly central to national resilience. Meanwhile, climate change intensifies these strains through heat stress, air pollution, and shifting disease patterns that health and care systems weren't built to absorb.
Employers have a part to play too. The Forum’s Thriving Workplaces report, produced with the McKinsey Health Institute, finds that employees with caring responsibilities are almost twice as likely to report high burn-out symptoms as those without. It estimates that investing in workforce health could generate up to $11.7 trillion in global economic value.
What does being digitally excluded mean for opportunity?
As we also see in the Technology article, around 2.2 billion people remain offline globally. For millions, a combination of high device costs, missing network coverage and limited digital skills keeps them locked out of job markets, learning pathways and essential services that have quietly migrated online – compounding every other barrier to progress.
This is where digital exclusion becomes, in practice, economic exclusion. Decisions about how AI systems are designed will shape who benefits from them. The productivity gains from digital infrastructure are concentrated in economies that are already connected, widening existing gaps rather than closing them, as the UN has warned.
Connection is only the first step. Kenya’s government-led Ajira Digital programme, supported by the Mastercard Foundation, offers young people free training and mentorship along with links to online work – a route into jobs that doesn’t depend on where someone lives.
What would make opportunity more accessible?
These five challenges are profoundly interconnected. Work in transition, an unevenly ageing world, a fraying social contract, a care system under strain and digital exclusion are, in practice, a single system pulling on people from multiple directions at once.
Making opportunity accessible requires considering training and job creation alongside care, health and digital access. Close the gap between changing work and outdated training, and fewer people will be left behind by automation. Help ageing and young economies share workers and opportunity, and both sides gain. Make sure productivity gains show up in pay and security, and societies stay open rather than turning inward. Give care systems the workers and tools they need, and the strain on millions of households eases. Connect the people still offline, and the gains of the digital economy reach further.
There are signs of this integrated thinking taking root, from skills coalitions and labour mobility partnerships to wage models that link pay to training and health services aimed at helping people back into work. The conversation is far from finished. But a call-centre worker retraining, a patient waiting for treatment that would let them return to work and a family that still can’t get online are facing different barriers – and those barriers can reinforce one another.
No single institution, sector or country can solve these challenges alone – because they do not exist alone. The economic, technological, social and planetary forces shaping our future are deeply interconnected, and so too must be the responses. At the World Economic Forum, we bring together the leaders, ideas and partnerships needed to turn shared understanding into collective action. Because moving the world forward starts with seeing the whole picture.
