New Research Finds That AI Is Creating More Jobs and Higher Pay

Opinions on how artificial intelligence will affect employment differ considerably—often radically. The most recent demonstration of the divide arose last week, when Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warned that AI apps like the kind his company is developing risk pushing joblessness up to 20 percent. That led serial entrepreneur Mark Cuban to counter with the prediction it’s more likely the tech will enable full employment instead. Now, a new study by consultancy PwC comes down somewhere in between those views, albeit far closer to the optimistic Cuban perspective. In its 2025 AI Jobs Barometer report, PwC said forecasts by skeptics that AI will unleash employment doom have failed to materialize in industries already embracing the tech most. It also noted the initial consequences of AI adoption included higher job creation, increased pay for those new positions, and reduced inequality by allowing people without university degrees to combine their skills with many AI-executed tasks formerly reserved for knowledge workers. “In contrast to worries that AI could cause sharp reductions in the number of jobs available, this year’s findings show jobs are growing in virtually every type of AI-exposed occupation, including highly automatable ones,” said PwC global chief AI officer Joe Atkinson in the report. “AI is amplifying and democratizing expertise, enabling employees to multiply their impact, and focus on higher-level responsibilities.” Those and other findings in the study may serve to undermine some of the more dire predictions made by AI critics. To create the study, PwC analyzed 800 million job posting and combed through thousands of financial reports of businesses in a variety of sectors. In addition to finding companies that had integrated the tech most reported increased job creation, the consultancy found five other ways AI adoption creates positive effects. For example, wages rose “twice as quickly in those industries most exposed to AI compared to those least exposed,” it said—even for people working in highly automatable roles. One reason for that increased pay was surging productivity, with the companies having embraced AI the most quadrupling their output compared with slower adopting businesses. With AI increasingly automating research, writing, accounting, and a lot of other duties previously handled by knowledge workers, employees without college degrees were able to add those tasks to the skills they were initially hired for by using AI. By broadening the range and deepening the value of their work for employers, those people benefitted from the average 56 percent wage premium that businesses have accorded people with AI capabilities, PwC said. In other words, rather than pushing employees out of jobs by automating them, AI has thus far permitted workers to enhance their value to businesses by doing a wider number of tasks, boosting their productivity, and increasing their pay as they did. But to make that shift, the PwC report said, people—and their employers—had to be both willing and quick to adjust to the demands of the quickly developing tech. “AI’s rapid advance is not just reshaping industries, but fundamentally altering the workforce and the skills required,” said PwC global workforce leader Pete Brown. “This is not a situation that employers can easily buy their way out of. Even if they can pay the premium required to attract talent with AI skills, those skills can quickly become out of date without investment in the systems to help the workforce learn.” Of course, skeptics may argue that in examining initial consequences of the fairly recent and still developing tech, PwC may have merely focused on an initially positive phase the could be followed by mass job cuts as companies master AI and automate as many roles as they can. But PwC global chief commercial officer Carol Stubbing argues that history suggests otherwise. “We know that every time we have an industrial revolution, there are more jobs created than lost,” Stubbing said, with the caveat that employees will need to continually revolutionize their skills to harness the powers of AI. “So the challenge, we believe, is not that there won’t be jobs. It’s that workers need to be prepared to take them.” BY BRUCE CRUMLEY @BRUCEC_INC