Savior or scourge. It’s all in the AI of the beholder.
Many people have called artificial intelligence the biggest technological innovation of all time, with some comparing it to the likes of fire, electricity, and the internet.
Microsoft (MSFT) co-founder Bill Gates said the development of AI is the most important technological advance in decades, while Nvidia (NVDA) CEO and founder Jensen Huang declared that the world is in the early stages of a new “AI Industrial Revolution.”
AI is making its presence felt in the workplace, sparking both excitement and concern. Surveys have found that over half of employees feel some level of anxiety regarding their job security due to AI.
Huang has maintained that AI will not be a job destroyer that some people fear. During an interview at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos, Switzerland, he said the AI boom is creating demand for manual labor to build data centers.
“It’s wonderful that the jobs are related to tradecraft and we’re going to have plumbers and electricians and construction and steelworkers,” he told BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, according to Business Insider.
Maria Black, president and CEO of ADP, a human capital management software company, wrote on the WEF annual meeting website that “AI has become a true teammate in the modern workforce, solving real problems alongside the worker.”
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has declared that the world is in the early stages of a new ‘AI Industrial Revolution.’
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Executive cites need to keep people at the center
“As people and technology continue to grow together, the human capital management (HCM) industry faces a critical responsibility: We must ensure AI innovation remains responsible and ethical, while keeping people at the center.”
Black added that this means finding new ways to amplify human creativity and connection, while prioritizing learning that keeps pace with technology.
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“If we succeed in this commitment, we will help build an AI-powered workforce and a future we all want to live in,” she said.
Black noted that Stanford University’s 2025 Artificial Intelligence Index Report found that generative AI, which creates original content by learning data from existing models, attracted nearly $34 billion in private investment in 2024, up 18.7% from the previous year.
“And adoption is quickly rising to match,” she said. “Seventy-eight per cent of the companies surveyed used AI in 2024, reflecting a 55% increase from the year before and outpacing the adoption of the internet in the early 2000s.”
An ADP study found 43% of respondents said they used GenAI frequently at work, with heavy users working in technology or information services.
“As AI advancement accelerates, companies must redouble their efforts to upskill and reskill their workforce, starting with their leaders,” Black said. “Workers need to understand when, why and how to use AI in their roles, as well as how to challenge, integrate and manage these systems.”
In a study released this month, analysts at Deloitte said that AI has already “transformed the way we work and create, yet we have barely scratched the surface of what’s possible when human expertise and AI capabilities unite.”
“Business leaders today face an unprecedented challenge: moving beyond pilots to truly integrating AI into the heart of their organizations,” the firm said in the report “State of AI in the Enterprise.”
“It requires a deliberate shift in which people set a vision and make responsible choices, and AI provides the insights, speed, and scale to deliver against that ambition.”
IMF head: AI hit job market like tsunami
Deloitte said that this means redesigning core processes and operating models with AI, ensuring that human strengths—such as judgment, creativity, empathy, and relationship-building—are elevated, not automated.
“On the one hand, we see clear acceleration from organizations,” the firm said, “with wider workforce access to AI tools, early productivity gains, and growing confidence in AI’s potential.”
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However, on the other hand, Deloitte said that it sees a gap between experimentation and true enterprise transformation.
“Many organizations are primarily using AI to drive efficiency, while a smaller group are pulling ahead by beginning to reimagine business models, offerings, roles, and ways of working,” the study said.
While autonomous AI agents, which independently pursue complex goals, are racing into the enterprise, Deloitte said that oversight is lagging.
Roughly 74% companies surveyed plan to deploy agentic AI within two years, but 21% reported having a mature model for governance of autonomous agents, raising the specter of unintended risks.
Kristalina Georgieva, Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund, told delegates in Davos that the IMF’s own research suggested there would be a big transformation of demand for skills, as the technology becomes increasingly widespread.
“We expect over the next years, in advanced economies, 60% of jobs to be affected by AI, either enhanced or eliminated or transformed—40% globally,” Georgieva told The Guardian. “This is like a tsunami hitting the labor market.”
She suggested that in advanced economies, one in 10 jobs had already been “enhanced” by AI, tending to boost these workers’ pay, with knock-on benefits for the local economy.
Meanwhile, Georgieva warned that AI would wipe out many roles traditionally taken up by younger workers.
“Tasks that are eliminated are usually what entry-level jobs do at present, so young people searching for jobs find it harder to get to a good placement,” she said.
People whose jobs were not directly changed by artificial intelligence risked being squeezed, she said, with their pay potentially falling without a productivity boost from AI.
“So, the middle class, inevitably, is going to be affected,” Georgieva said.
Related: The AI megatrend: What 2026 holds for tech stocks and productivity
