Four Futures for Jobs in the New Economy AI and Talent in 2030 2025

In the meantime, global talent dynamics are shifting too. Demographic trends, persistent skills gaps and strained social safety nets create complex – and often compounding – pressures on labour markets. The shortening longevity of skills demands greater agility and foresight from education and training systems. Considering the impact of AI alone, LinkedIn estimates that the demand for AI literacy skills has increased by 70% between 2024 and 2025.4 Taken together, these shifts – and the diffusion of agentic AI – deepen the uncertainty around the future of the technology and its implications for businesses, workers and the global economy. The transformations that once appeared as distant futures now arrive at speed and scale. Businesses across industries face growing competition to innovate quickly, balance evolving investment priorities and adapt in near real time. Simultaneously, governments are navigating a tightening fiscal space and complex decisions on enabling innovation while supporting jobs and economic inclusion. These trends create new opportunities for industries and individual businesses, but also risks. Looking at business strategies in the next five years, the results of the Forum’s latest survey of chief strategy officers highlighted commercialization of AI and emerging technologies (72%), talent shortage and workforce transformation (24%) as some of the most impactful trends. Throughout 2025–2026, the Forum’s Scenarios for the Global Economy Dialogue Series uses scenario analysis and peer-level, cross-sectoral dialogue to help decision-makers understand the evolving patterns of the global economy and their implications for strategy, investment decisions and resilience. This second paper in the series explores scenarios for the future of jobs at the intersection of AI advancement and workforce readiness vectors and their potential trajectories until 2030. The AI advancement vector represents the pace and scale of progress in the capability and autonomy of AI technologies. The scenarios consider exponential and incremental trajectories of AI advancement. The workforce readiness vector captures the availability of skills among workers that support their preparedness for an AI-driven economy. The scenarios consider widespread and limited AI readiness. Combining these two vectors generates four plausible futures, each with different implications for corporate strategies, business models, investments and workflows. 6 Four Futures for Jobs in the New Economy: AI and Talent in 2030