AI skill levels drive workforce divide: PwC - CFO Dive

PwC has surveyed the workforce and discovered a divide, which is rather like a meteorologist discovering rain. The poll, released Tuesday, finds a 'wide range of AI proficiency among workers,' with the biggest single cohort reporting that they are falling behind their more tech-savvy colleagues. So the modal respondent in a PwC survey is now the one losing. That is not a divide; that is a verdict with a chart stapled to it, and it arrived just in time for someone to sell you the bridge across it.

Pete Brown, PwC's Global Workforce leader, warns of 'a real risk that the global workforce is starting to move at different speeds.' Global Workforce leader — a title that assumes somebody, somewhere, is following. And the diagnosis is speed, because speed is blameless: nobody is being left behind, they are merely travelling at a different velocity through the same economy. Mr Brown's phrasing does a great deal of quiet work. If the workforce is simply moving at 'different speeds,' then no employer decided anything, no budget was reallocated, and no consultant ever billed an hour for the transformation that made the speeds differ.

Note what the release actually offers: a 'wide range,' a 'biggest cohort,' a 'different speeds.' Adjectives where the numbers should be — fitting, really, since the thing being measured is proficiency, and proficiency is precisely what nobody can audit. The 'more tech-savvy colleagues,' meanwhile, worked out that a chatbot is a typing pool with a personality, and they are now rewarded for the same job with more flair. Everyone else is told they are 'upskilling,' which is corporate for 'please resubmit yourself by Friday.' The article doesn't say that. The article doesn't say much. And it still reads like a warning label with the dosage left off. A workforce moving at different speeds is not a risk, Mr Brown — it's a results table, and the biggest cohort has already read it.