Two numbers from PwC’s latest global workforce survey, side by side.
Nearly two-thirds of workers (64%) used AI at work in the past year, up ten points. And the share who say they can get the learning and development they need fell from 59% to 51%.
Use is going up. Help is going down.
Who’s in the engine room
PwC surveyed 49,364 workers across 48 countries and sorted them into four groups. A small group of front-runners, 14%, have scarce skills and are already strong with AI. Two other groups make up another 29%.
And then there’s the biggest group by far. PwC calls it the engine room: 56% of the workforce, people whose skills aren’t scarce and who aren’t far along with AI yet.
It’s not a flattering label, but read what PwC says about them. They are the majority of the workforce, responsible for most of the day-to-day work. They’re also less likely to be rewarded for using AI, for learning new skills or for questioning how things are done.
Only two in five of them say they can get the learning they need.
If you run a business of forty people, that’s most of your team. The person who processes the orders, the one who runs the rosters, the one who has done the accounts the same careful way for fifteen years. They’re the ones keeping the place running.
Where confidence comes from
Here’s the finding I think matters most.
People who use AI every day are more confident in their job security: 68%, against 57% of people who use it rarely. They’re more likely to trust top management, by 15 points, and more confident they can learn new skills, by 21.
I want to be careful with that. It’s a comparison between groups, so it can’t tell us which way round it runs. Maybe using AI every day makes people less afraid. Maybe less afraid people use it more. Probably some of both.
But it lines up with what I see. Fear of AI rarely survives a few weeks of using it on your own work and watching a task you dread get easier. And the people who haven’t had that experience aren’t usually resistant. Mostly, nobody has made the time or space for them to try it.
In New Zealand, that space is mostly being filled privately. Employment Hero found 51% of workers learned their AI skills from YouTube and TikTok.
The temptation
When budgets and attention are short, the natural move is to back the keen ones. They’re visible, they ask for things, and PwC adds a reason to worry: 29% of its front-runners say they are very or extremely likely to change employer within a year.
That’s a real retention problem, and it deserves attention. PwC’s own workforce lead puts the balance well: keep developing those people, “but not at the expense of the rest of the workforce.”
Because if all the support goes to the front-runners, the gap PwC describes gets wider inside your own business. A few people race ahead. Most people keep doing the work the old way, quietly wondering what it means for them.
What steady support looks like
None of this needs a big programme. For the engine room it mostly needs three things:
- Time inside the working week. If learning AI only happens after hours, it happens on TikTok.
- Real work. The order notes, the quote, the weekly report. Not an abstract demo.
- Their own pace. The person who’s been doing the accounts for fifteen years doesn’t need to keep up with the 25-year-old. She needs one task she does every week to get noticeably easier, with nobody watching over her shoulder.
Declaring an interest
Helping businesses do exactly this is what we do at Coreshift, so read my conclusion with that in mind.
But the PwC numbers stand on their own. Use is rising, help is falling, and the people getting the least of it are the ones doing most of the work. The most useful thing a leader can do is make sure the engine room isn’t working it out alone.