PwC Report Finds AI Creating Two-Track Global Labor Market

The professional services firm PwC released its 2026 Global AI Jobs Barometer, analyzing over one billion job advertisements across 27 countries and six continents. The report identifies an emerging two-track labor market divided into professionalised roles, where AI amplifies human expertise to drive growth, and democratised roles, where AI simplifies tasks for non-experts. Professionalised roles are growing twice as fast and seeing 42% faster wage growth than their democratised counterparts.

In the United States, AI-exposed entry-level roles are now seven times more likely to require senior-level skills such as leadership and judgment. This shift is evident in the insurance industry, where job openings for transactional operations and call centers have hit decade lows while demand for senior underwriters and analytics specialists increases. Despite these trends, MIT academic David Autor warns that workers in routine information-processing roles, such as insurance claims adjustment, face genuine displacement risk.

The findings highlight a superstar effect, with the top 20% of AI-exposed companies achieving 163% labor productivity growth relative to 2018. While some firms including Meta, Cisco, Oracle, and Citigroup have cut thousands of jobs to invest in AI, the most AI-exposed firms overall show higher headcount and productivity growth. Furthermore, employees with specific AI skills now command an average wage premium of 62%, with jobs requiring these skills growing nearly eight times faster than the general market.