Returns to intelligence: Worker and firm adaptation to advances in AI

The AI Revolution

It is up to the pioneers, leaders, and curious thinkers who must now lead us through the most disruptive time in the authors' history.

Businesses Are Using AI to Transform Work, Not Cut Jobs

The ongoing advancement and adoption of artificial intelligence continues to raise concerns about widespread job losses. Over the past three years, our regional business surveys have asked firms about their AI adoption and its effects on their workforces. This year, we found that AI use among regional businesses has co...

Relative Development and the Intelligence Divide

Will artificial intelligence (AI) help poorer countries catch up? This paper argues that the answer depends less on access to AI than on the capacity to use new knowledge productively. We show that countries have narrowed gaps in capital and schooling more readily than gaps in productivity. Technology can diffuse widel...

Work Transformed: The Promise and Peril of Artificial Intelligence

Reskilled or Left Behind: The Hidden Inequality in AI Training

ABSTRACT Artificial intelligence is rapidly changing what employees do, what skills organizations value, and how firms prepare their workforce for technological change. Yet an important issue is receiving much less attention: access to AI reskilling may not be equally distributed. Organizations may invest heavily in em...

Principal Workers: Orchestrating AI Agents Improves Productivity

For the artificial intelligence (AI) economy, we propose a principal worker model where each knowledge worker is both a task architect and an AI agent orchestrator. As task architect, the worker divides each task into subtasks and delegates some to AI agents. As agent orchestrator, the worker optimizes outputs from AI...