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

In this scenario, an exponential breakthrough in AI capabilities has reshaped economies and created new industries, drastically shortening the timeline to artificial general intelligence (AGI). A radical redesign of education and training systems has enabled the workforce to adapt rapidly. Competition from open-source AI models has helped accelerate the development of AI agents while keeping costs low, enabling broad-based commercialization of AI agents and redefining the approaches to work, learning and value creation. By 2030, many occupations have disappeared entirely, and jobs have shifted from task execution to design and oversight of AI-enabled ecosystems. The productivity return from AI integration has outstripped early projections of a 1.3 percentage point (pp) increase,5 spurring an AI deployment race across industries. AI capital expenditure (CapEx) has surpassed $1.3 trillion over the 2025–2030 period,6 with investments into compute and data infrastructure transforming AI from a tool into a core economic actor. A shift to an AI-centric economy has intensified many structural tensions around labour displacement, governance gaps, sustainability strains and rising questions about the role and value of human workers. –Occupations and tasks: Labour markets have restructured around agentic faultlines, with the share of tasks performed by technology spiking from 22% since 2025.7 Human work becomes modular, fluid and AI-mediated. A significant number of occupations and tasks common in the mid-2020s have disappeared or shrunk in scope. Countries and industries with strong digital readiness and early investment in AI-tailored training have managed to curb mass unemployment, with workers now overseeing hundreds of “digital employees” and a fleet of specialized AI agents or shifting to narrowing human-centric jobs. However, displacement and job quality degradation are common across all sectors and geographies. –Economic outlook: An agentic leap has unlocked unprecedented productivity gains, with global GDP (gross domestic product) growth nearing double digits and a significant increase in corporate profit margins. Public and private investments rise rapidly, directed primarily into AI networks, compute, quantum, data infrastructure, talent pipelines and AI-complementary technologies. AI tools make creativity and entrepreneurship accessible to millions who were previously excluded due to geography or education. Innovation and leapfrogging scale rapidly across sectors and geographies, breaking legacy frontiers in energy, materials and health. However, accelerating automation and looming AGI risks weigh on the long-term outlook, investor confidence and sustainability spillovers. –Value chains: The convergence of agentic AI architecture, quantum advancement and blurring of physical and digital ecosystems has allowed industries to restructure around agentic operating layers, reaching an inflection point where AI networks become as central as electricity grids. Digital twins and autonomous end-to-end coordination become standard. –Inequality and polarization: Inequality widens as wage premiums for the AI-ready workforce have nearly doubled from 56% projected in the mid- 2020s.8 Workers in human-centric occupations – including in care, hospitality, public and third sectors – see their wages erode slowly as competition for these roles rises. Other workers face declining bargaining power despite overall productivity gains, with wages plummeting across most sectors. –Policy and regulatory landscape: Regulatory regimes lag behind the pace and depth of the agentic transformation. Ethical frameworks are slow to adapt, and safety nets struggle to keep up. Some governments experiment with AI dividends, wage insurance and universal basic income models.9 Others grapple with the trade- offs between rapidly tightening fiscal space and growing societal strain. 9 Four Futures for the New Economy: Geoeconomics and Technology in 2030