The new workforce divide

A huge survey of 50,000 workers says AI is splitting employees into four distinct groups. And most of us are toiling in the engine room

IN THE CLASSIC movie Mean Girls, viewers are introduced to the lunchroom and its distinct cliques — the preps, varsity jocks, sexually active band geeks, desperate wannabes and so on. The modern AI-powered workplace is (at least according to a new study from PwC) somewhat similar: it’s got the AI insurgents, the front-runners, the indispensables and the engine room workers.

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That’s the gist of the firm’s latest Hopes and Fears survey, which polled nearly 50,000 workers this spring and sorted them by how much AI is helping them and how hard they’d be to replace. At the top are the front-runners, the 14 per cent with in-demand skills who say AI is making them better at their jobs. The insurgents (18 per cent) have less sought-after skills but use AI ambitiously anyway, and the indispensables (11 per cent) are rare enough that they don’t really need to bother with it anyways. That leaves the engine room, which is everybody else, comprising 56 per cent of workers.

“On one side, an optimistic minority group of AI-enabled front-runners who are motivated, adaptive and ready to advance — within or beyond their organizations,” the report reads. “On the other, an anxious majority group of core workers who worry about their jobs and finances, feel shut out of growth and learning and distrust their leaders.”

But it’s worth asking: how exactly does one end up in the engine room, in PwC’s conception? Pretty easily, if you’re not all-in on AI, it seems.

Anyone who doesn’t use AI gets dropped into the low-AI box automatically, and PwC lumped the bottom two of its three skill-demand tiers together, creating a big, unhappy middle that is more or less baked into its mental model of the AI workplace.

Most of the engine room said they’ve never used AI, and only a quarter say they’ve picked up new tools or seen more change in the past year. So it’s hard to tell whether they’ve been left behind by AI, or just haven’t found much use for it yet.

To some degree, this is probably PwC trying to legitimize a category system it is then going to sell to businesses — some of which might still be in 2025 mode, thinking AI can simply replace everyone (after all, looking at a list of employees labelled “engine-roomers” seems like target-on-the-back positioning). It is not the conclusion PwC wants as a takeaway here, though. The engine-roomers just require some love and attention, the company said. “For the squeezed majority in the engine room, organizations need to make learning and reskilling available without increasing workloads,” PwC said. “That should include training and tools to help them reduce financial stress.”

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Does the workplace need more categories like this? That’s unclear. Does it need more consultants creating more categories? Also very debatable. “While those divisions aren’t necessarily problematic on their own, they may eventually create some friction arising from the other differences between workers they produce,” wrote Inc.’s Bruce Crumley.

One can imagine that a worker lightly chastised for being an engine-roomer might think these categories are a pointless endeavour, and something that doesn’t get anyone any closer to understanding what AI might do to the future of work. “Workers aren’t expecting leaders to, I think, sugarcoat everything,” PwC’s Peter Brown told Business Insider. “They just want to understand what’s going on.” Kieran Delamont