The office of 2026 is a place of two speeds. In one lane are the workers who open an artificial-intelligence tool the way an earlier generation opened a spreadsheet – daily, instinctively, without ceremony. They feel energised. They trust their bosses. They are, increasingly, asking for a raise. In the other lane, moving slower and with less certainty, sits the majority – the people who do most of the work but are being handed fewer of the tools to keep up.
That widening gap is the central finding of PwC’s 2026 Global Workforce Hopes and Fears Survey, an unusually large canvass of 49,364 workers across 48 countries and regions and 29 sectors, conducted in May and June of this year. Its portrait of the modern workforce is not one of collapse, but of divergence; a labour market quietly separating into those who are riding the technological wave and those being left in its wake.
And the paradox at its heart is difficult to ignore: even as artificial intelligence spreads through the workplace faster than ever, the training that would let ordinary workers master it is being withdrawn.
The disappearing ladder
The numbers tell a blunt story. Just 51 percent of workers now say they have access to the learning and development resources they need – down sharply from 59 percent a year ago. Put plainly, as the ground shifts beneath their feet, workers are being offered fewer handholds.
The shortfall is most severe precisely where it can do the most damage. Among the 56 percent of employees PwC calls the “engine room” – the workers whose skills are not scarce and who have not travelled far along the AI learning curve – only two in five say they can reach the training they require. These are, by the firm’s own reckoning, the people “responsible for most of the day-to-day work within an organisation.” They are also the least likely to be rewarded for using AI, for acquiring new skills, or for challenging how things have always been done.
“There is a real risk that the global workforce is starting to move at different speeds,” said Pete Brown, PwC’s Global Workforce Leader. “More than half of workers are not yet benefiting from AI and skills in the same way, while those with scarce skills and strong AI capabilities are becoming more confident and more mobile.”
The dividend of daily use
For those on the other side of the divide, the rewards are tangible; almost self-reinforcing.
Workers who use AI every day report a confidence their peers do not share. Sixty-eight percent say they feel secure in their jobs, against 57 percent of infrequent users. They are 12 percentage points more likely to ask for a promotion, 15 points more likely to trust top management, and a striking 21 points more confident they can learn whatever new skills the job demands. The very act of using the technology, they say, leaves them feeling energised and empowered rather than tired and powerless – by a margin of roughly five to one.
Adoption, meanwhile, keeps climbing. Nearly two-thirds of all workers – 64 percent – say they used AI at work over the past year, a ten-point jump from 2025. The share reaching for generative AI daily has swelled from 14 percent to 22 percent, and 59 percent expect their use to grow further over the coming year.
“Those using AI every day are more confident, more ambitious and more positive about their careers and prospects,” Mr. Brown said. “The challenge for leaders is to keep developing those people; but not at the expense of the rest of the workforce.”
Pressure from every direction
If AI is the current pulling workers apart, the water itself is growing rougher.
The cost-of-living squeeze has tightened its grip: only a third of workers report having money left at the end of the month, down eight percentage points in a single year. Nearly three in ten – 29 percent – say they have significantly less bargaining power than they did three years ago, more than double the share who disagree. For fully remote workers, that sense of diminished leverage runs ten points higher.
The anxieties are not evenly distributed. Asked to name the greatest threat to their job security, more workers pointed to economic volatility (57 percent) than to AI absorbing their tasks (44 percent) – with Gen Z more nervous on every measure.
Change fatigue is setting in, too. Among those who have lived through workplace upheaval, 58 percent feel the past year brought more of it than any before. More than a quarter – 27 percent – say burnout is now limiting how much they can get done. And the demand to adapt is relentless: the vast majority say they have had to apply new skills over the past year, two in five to a large or very large degree.
That pressure, tellingly, is heaviest at the top. More than half of senior executives (51 percent) and 46 percent of managers say they have had to apply new skills; against 29 percent of non-managers and 38 percent of entry-level staff. Transformation, it seems, is arriving first in the corner office.
The flight risk at the front
The final, sharpest twist in PwC’s findings concerns the very workers employers can least afford to lose.
The firm sorts the global workforce into four groups. The “front-runners,” 14 percent of the total, combine scarce skills with strong AI capabilities. The “AI insurgents,” 18 percent, hold less scarce skills but wield AI to deliver more. The “indispensables,” 11 percent, possess prized skills but have yet to climb far up the AI curve. And the “engine room,” at 56 percent, forms the vast, essential majority.
It is the front-runners who are reaping the spoils. They over-index on being rewarded for challenging the status quo – at 1.5 times the global average – and for learning new skills, at 1.2 times. They are 33 points more likely than the average worker to ask for a promotion.
They are also, ominously for their employers, halfway out the door. Almost a third – 29 percent – say they are very or extremely likely to change employer within the next year.
That is the bind facing corporate leaders: the workers most valuable to the AI age are the most confident, the most in demand, and the most willing to walk. Meanwhile the majority who keep the lights on are being offered the least support to catch up.
“Leaders need to think hard about where they invest in skills,” Mr. Brown concluded, “how they give people the opportunity to adapt, and how they hold on to the capabilities they most need.”
The survey suggests the cost of getting that wrong is now twofold — losing the few who have already pulled ahead, while stranding the many who never got the chance to.
PwC’s 2026 Global Workforce Hopes and Fears Survey gathered responses from 49,364 workers across 48 countries and regions and 29 sectors in May and June 2026. Figures are weighted proportionally to the working population’s gender and age distribution in each country or region.
