The advent of artificial intelligence and rapid AI adoption across the economy is reshaping the skills that employers are seeking, with AI now creating a “two-track labour market,” a report by global consulting firm PwC says.
While in some cases, AI will act as a “force-multiplier” for some experts, it will make some other jobs easier for non-experts, the report called ‘Global AI Jobs Barometer’ said on Monday.
The report is a study of more than one billion job ads across six continents and found that “AI is driving a ‘two-track’ global labour market.”
It outlines two kinds of job postings. The first one was for ‘professionalized’ roles, or roles where AI automates routine tasks so human judgment and expertise are emphasized. The second kind are ‘democratized’ roles, or those where AI has made the job itself easier for non-experts.
The first kind, which includes roles such as radiologists and recruiters, saw twice the growth in available jobs as opposed to the second kind, which includes jobs like IT service managers or medical secretaries, the analysis found.
These roles also saw a 42-per cent faster salary growth than the second kind of role.
“Across the global economy, we’re beginning to see a new divide emerge between different models for talent and value creation,” said Joe Atkinson, global chief AI officer at PwC.
“The companies seeing the greatest returns on AI are using it to amplify human expertise, accelerate innovation and create entirely new sources of value,” Atkinson said.
“As a result, they are pulling further ahead on productivity and growth than companies that focus primarily on automation,” he added.
The AI boom is also reshaping what hiring managers expect from entry-level workers. Analysis of U.S. data shows that AI-exposed entry level roles are seven times more likely to expect junior employees to perform “senior” tasks, such as “leadership, creativity or face-to-face interactions,” the report said.
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Some experts, however, say it is reductive to look at only tracks of the job market. The AI boom is still relatively new, and its impact is not yet certain and could be different in different sectors, said Avi Goldfarb, a professor at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management.
“If you give call centre workers an AI tool that allows them to get prompts for what a good response might be, but you still have the worker in the loop actually talking to the customer, then that helps the lower-skilled workers relative to the high-skilled workers,” he said.
In another context, however, a more experienced worker might benefit, he said.
“Using AI for the sciences helps the relatively more experienced and more successful principal investigators. In certain cases, it seems to help the more successful scientists,” he said.
In February, Bank of Canada governor Tiff Macklem warned that AI may be killing entry level jobs in Canada.
He said while in some cases, there may be increased demand for workers with AI skills, the “flip side is we may be seeing some early evidence that AI is reducing the number of entry-level jobs in some occupations.”
In 2016, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Geoff Hinton, also sometimes referred to as the ‘Godfather of AI’, said AI would make certain jobs obsolete.
“If you work as a radiologist, you’re like the coyote that’s already over the cliff but hasn’t yet looked down so he doesn’t realize there’s no ground underneath,” he said at a talk.
Monday’s report cites radiology as an example of a profession that has seen growth because of AI. This shows that the future of the job market is not set in stone, Goldfarb said.
“The skills of the labour market in 2031 are going to be different than the skills that allow people to thrive in the labour market in 2026. Exactly what training is going to be required for those skills is still an open question,” he said.
But that doesn’t mean young people looking to enter the job market can’t prepare, he said.
“The first thing is there’s still things somebody needs to know upon graduation. If you’re in a meeting, and you have to look up the basics of marketing or the basics of finance while talking to your boss, you’re not going to look good,” Goldfarb said.
Young people should also think about learning basic AI proficiency, he said.
“When they graduate, the employers expect them to know to use the tools available and to take advantage of them,” he said.
A third strategy is to learn “people skills.”
“They have to know how to communicate and communicate well and communicate effectively. So much of the future of work is going be interacting with other people, not just writing the report, but communicating the report and understanding it deeply,” he said.
“And then fourth, they have to have what we call judgment. Judgment is knowing what matters to the organization and understanding risks,” he said.
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