Executive perceptions of Adverse outcomes of AI technologies, 2026–2028 FIGURE 53 Source World Economic Forum Executive Opinion Survey 2025.Executive Opinion Survey rank of national risks derived from the question “In your country, what are the top ﬁve risks that are most likely to pose the biggest threat to your country in the next two years?”. 1st10th20th30th34thRankfor cascading failures across interconnected domains. Labour displacement ripples widely, into households, communities and political systems. Lack of economic opportunity or unemployment (ranked #14 in the GRPS 10-year ranking) can drive extremism; institutional distrust is interlinked with misinformation and disinformation; and surveillance empowers authoritarian responses to the instability that AI creates. Once established, these loops could become self-reinforcing. Concerns are visible in country-level business sentiment across the two-year time horizon, according to the Executive Opinion Survey 2025 (EOS). Three countries rank Adverse outcomes of AI technologies as their single most important national risk and 20 countries place it within their top five (Figure 53). Regional and income-group averages show a similar pattern, with the risk ranking as high as #4 in South-Eastern Asia. Jobless productivity Within a decade, AI and automation could displace human labour in many roles, disrupting labour markets on a historic scale. Estimates of labour- market impacts vary widely. One estimate notes that 86% of companies worldwide expect AI to transform their business models by 2030, rising to 97% in finance and 99% in information technology, but that the labour market impact will be positive on balance, with 170 million new roles set to be created and 92 million displaced, resulting in a net increase of 78 million jobs globally by 2030.155 A more negative view suggests that AI could eliminate up to 50% of entry-level, white-collar jobs within the next five years in the United States, potentially driving unemployment to 10–20%.156 In a negative scenario for labour markets, market forces, unchecked by governance due to geopolitical competition, will accelerate the propensity to automate and replace human labour as much as possible compared to approaches to augment human tasks and skills. While new roles and tasks may emerge and offset losses, these could unfold in a much longer timeline than job displacement, like in previous major technological shifts. In such a scenario, the gains from AI will accrue mainly to highly skilled, high-productivity digital workers, while opportunities will contract faster for low-productivity workers who do not build relevant skills. Those jobs that still exist for the latter group would offer relatively depressed wages. When displacement reaches populations such as the managerial and professional Global Risks Report 2026 62