PwC’s 2025 Global AI Jobs Barometer analysed close to a billion job advertisements and thousands of company financial reports from six continents. The headline finding: industries most exposed to AI are seeing productivity growth nearly four times higher than industries least exposed, and workers with AI skills command a 56% wage premium over peers in the same occupation without those skills. The data covers 2018 to 2024 and captures the period in which agentic AI began reaching mainstream adoption.
Productivity
The report measures productivity as revenue generated per employee. Industries in the most AI-exposed quartile (software publishing, financial services) grew revenue per employee by 27% between 2018 and 2024. Industries in the least exposed quartile (mining, hospitality) grew by 8.5% over the same period. In 2022, the gap between these quartiles was narrow: 7.3% for the most exposed versus 9.9% for the least. By 2024, the most exposed quartile had pulled ahead by a factor of three.
PwC cannot prove causation. The report notes that the acceleration coincided with the launch of ChatGPT 3.5 in late 2022 and the subsequent corporate investment cycle in AI. The correlation is consistent across countries and sectors in the dataset.
Wages
Wages are growing twice as fast in industries most exposed to AI (16.7% growth from 2018 to 2024) compared to the least exposed (7.9%). The wage premium for AI skills, measured by comparing workers in the same occupation who differ only by whether they hold AI skills like machine learning or prompt engineering, averaged 56% globally. That figure was 25% in the 2024 edition of the barometer. Every industry analysed showed a positive AI skills wage premium, ranging from above 120% in wholesale and retail trade to roughly 10% in construction.
The report also finds wages rising in roles most susceptible to automation, including customer service and data entry. PwC interprets this as evidence that automation is changing the nature of these roles rather than eliminating them, shifting workers toward higher-value tasks while AI handles routine ones.
Job numbers
Job numbers are growing in virtually every AI-exposed occupation globally, with two exceptions: keyboard clerks and ICT professionals. However, growth is slower in occupations more exposed to AI (38% over five years) than in less exposed ones (65%). Job numbers are growing for both automatable and augmentable roles across all industries.
PwC frames the slower growth in AI-exposed occupations as potentially beneficial for economies with declining working-age populations, a category that now includes more than a quarter of the world’s countries. The report suggests AI could moderate job growth to match shrinking labour pools rather than creating surplus demand that cannot be filled.
Early-adopter industries such as financial services and information and communication show the gentlest job growth, which is consistent with having absorbed AI-linked changes over a longer period.
Skills
The skills sought by employers are changing 66% faster in occupations most exposed to AI compared to least exposed ones. That rate was 25% in last year’s report. Automatable roles are experiencing the greatest skills disruption across almost every country analysed, with Japan, Norway, and Hong Kong showing the highest rates of change.
Employer demand for formal degrees is declining across all job types but fastest for AI-exposed roles. The share of augmentable jobs requiring a degree fell from 66% to 59% between 2019 and 2024. For automatable jobs, the decline was 9 percentage points, from 53% to 44%. PwC attributes this to three factors: AI enabling workers to build expert knowledge without formal training, rapid skills turnover making degrees obsolete faster, and strong demand pushing employers to recruit beyond the pool of formally credentialled candidates.
What the pattern shows
The PwC data establishes a clear economic return to AI skills and AI adoption. Workers and industries with AI capabilities are pulling ahead in productivity, wages, and revenue per employee. The gap widened sharply between 2022 and 2024, and the report’s own data on skills churn suggests it will continue widening.
The question the barometer does not address is access. A 56% wage premium for AI skills is a measure of value, but also a measure of exclusion. The skills sought by employers are changing at a rate that formal education systems were not designed to match, and the report itself notes that degree requirements are declining because the labour market has outpaced the institutions that grant degrees. Workers who can acquire AI skills through self-directed learning or employer-provided training benefit. Workers who lack the time, resources, or access to either route fall further behind.
PwC’s recommendation to business leaders is to “enable your workforce to have the skills to make the most of AI’s power.” The barometer provides the economic case for that investment. It does not address what happens to workers in organisations that choose not to make it, or in countries where no public provision exists to fill the gap.
Source: PwC, “The Fearless Future: 2025 Global AI Jobs Barometer”
Last updated: 2026-03-31