News & Articles

By Jonathan Liebert, CEO, BBB, Southern Colorado.

For years, much of the conversation about artificial intelligence and the workforce has centered on one question: How many jobs will AI eliminate?

PwC’s 2026 Global AI Jobs Barometer suggests that may be the wrong question. After analyzing more than one billion job advertisements across six continents, PwC found that AI is not simply replacing work. It is fundamentally reshaping jobs, changing the skills employers value and creating a widening gap between organizations that merely automate and those that use AI to grow.

For the staffing industry, that distinction matters enormously.

PwC describes two major ways jobs are evolving. Some are becoming “professionalised,” meaning AI automates routine activities and leaves employees responsible for more complex work requiring greater expertise and judgment. Others are becoming “democratised,” where AI performs some of the more specialized work, reducing the level of expertise previously required for the role.

Interestingly, PwC specifically identifies employment recruiters as a professionalised occupation. AI can increasingly handle tasks such as screening résumés, allowing recruiters to spend more time on higher-value activities such as advising candidates and employers, building relationships and negotiating agreements.

And professionalised jobs appear to be pulling ahead. They are growing roughly twice as fast as democratised jobs, while salaries in those occupations have grown 42% faster since 2021.

The Companies Winning With AI Aren’t Primarily Cutting Jobs

Perhaps the most important finding for business leaders is what PwC discovered about companies successfully deploying AI.

The organizations most exposed to AI are experiencing greater productivity growth, but an elite group of “superstar” companies is pulling dramatically ahead. Among highly AI-exposed companies, productivity has grown 33.5% relative to a 2018 baseline. The highest-performing 20% achieved productivity growth of 163%.

What separates them?

They are using AI for growth, not simply efficiency.

Rather than asking only, “How can AI help us accomplish the same work with fewer people?” these organizations are asking how AI can help them create new services, enter new markets, increase capacity and generate new revenue.

That distinction is important because PwC also found that headcount growth at highly AI-exposed companies is outpacing that of less-exposed companies. The companies generating the greatest value from AI do not appear to be using it exclusively to reduce their workforce. They are using increased productivity to fuel expansion, which in turn can create additional hiring and wage growth.

For staffing professionals, that should change the conversation. AI will eliminate some tasks and redesign many jobs, but organizations that treat AI exclusively as a cost-cutting strategy may be overlooking its greatest opportunity: expanding what people and organizations are capable of accomplishing.

AI Literacy Is Becoming Workforce Literacy

This creates an urgent challenge for staffing firms, employers and workers.

PwC found that skills required in the most AI-exposed occupations are changing more than twice as fast as those in the least-exposed occupations. Even more telling, workers with AI skills now command an average 62% wage premium over workers in comparable roles without those skills.

AI literacy therefore cannot remain limited to IT departments, data scientists or AI specialists. It increasingly needs to become a foundational workforce competency.

Workers need to understand what AI can do, how to work alongside it, how to evaluate its outputs, when human judgment is required and how to use these tools responsibly. Employers, meanwhile, need to provide opportunities for employees to learn and experiment with AI rather than simply providing access to technology and expecting adoption to happen.

Build Your AI Literacy at the BLAZE AI Summit

One opportunity to accelerate that learning is the BLAZE AI Summit on September 22 in Colorado Springs. This educational event is designed to help professionals and organizations learn more about how to effectively deploy AI in the workplace. For staffing leaders, HR professionals and employers navigating workforce transformation, events like BLAZE provide an opportunity to build practical AI knowledge and better understand how these technologies can be applied to real work.

Learn more about the BLAZE AI Summit

Importantly, however, becoming AI-ready is not only about learning technology.

As AI becomes more capable, distinctly human capabilities are becoming more valuable, not less. PwC found that new tasks emerging in highly AI-exposed occupations are 2.5 times more likely to rely on capabilities such as empathy, judgment, creativity, relationship-building and leadership.

That combination—AI capability plus human capability—may define the most valuable talent in the coming decade.

For the staffing industry, this represents both disruption and opportunity. Our role can no longer be simply matching résumés to job descriptions. Staffing professionals will increasingly help employers understand changing jobs, identify emerging skills and find people capable of thriving alongside AI.

The companies that win will not necessarily be those with the most AI.

They will be the companies with people who know what to do with it.