PwC Survey of 49,364 Workers: AI Use at Work Hits 64% as Training Access Falls to 51%

TL;DR

PwC's 2026 Global Workforce Hopes and Fears Survey polled 49,364 workers across 48 countries and regions and 29 sectors in May and June 2026. Workplace AI use climbed 10 points in a year to 64%, and daily generative AI use rose from 14% to 22%. Over the same year, the share of workers who say they can get the learning and development resources they need fell from 59% to 51%. PwC splits the workforce into four groups, and the biggest one, the 56% it calls the "engine room," is the one being left behind. The small group that already has scarce skills and strong AI habits is getting rewarded, getting confident, and, at a 29% rate, getting ready to quit.

The headline numbers

This is one of the larger recurring worker surveys anywhere, and the results are weighted to each country's working population by gender and age, so it is not a sample of early adopters on a tech forum. Three numbers moved between the 2025 and 2026 editions, and they did not move in the same direction.

• 64% of workers used AI at work in the past 12 months, up 10 points year on year.
• 22% use generative AI every day, up from 14%. That is a 57% jump in the daily-user base in one survey cycle.
• 59% expect their use of AI tools to increase over the next 12 months, and that group says AI makes them feel energised and empowered rather than tired and powerless by margins of about 5 to 1.
• 51% say they can access the learning and development resources they need, down from 59%.

Put the first and last lines next to each other and you get the story. Employers rolled the tools out faster than ever while the training budget quietly walked the other way. It is the corporate equivalent of handing everyone a car and then cancelling the driving lessons because the cars seem to be moving.

Four tribes, one of them very large

PwC segments respondents on two axes: how scarce their skills are, and how far along the AI learning curve they are. The result is four groups.

The engine room

This is the 56% majority, the people who do most of the day-to-day work in any organisation. Only two in five of them say they can access the learning they need. PwC also reports they are less likely to be rewarded for using AI, learning new skills, or challenging existing ways of working. In other words, the incentive structure points away from exactly the behaviour employers say they want.

The front-runners

The 14% with scarce skills and strong AI capabilities are doing well. They over-index on being rewarded for challenging existing ways of working (1.5x the global average) and for learning new skills (1.2x), and they are 33 points more likely than average to ask for a promotion. Almost a third of them (29%) say they are very or extremely likely to change employer in the next year.

That is the retention problem in the press release headline. The people most able to turn AI into output are also the people with the most options, and they know it.

Daily users feel better about almost everything

PwC compared people who use AI daily with infrequent users. The daily crowd is more confident on every dimension it measured.

Before anyone puts this on a sales slide: it is correlation from a survey, not a controlled experiment. People who already feel secure, trusted, and capable may simply be the ones who adopt tools daily. The arrow could run either way, and probably runs both.

The pressure around it

The AI numbers sit inside a fairly grim backdrop:

• Only a third of workers report having money left at the end of the month, which PwC says is down 8% year on year.
• 29% say they have significantly less bargaining power than three years ago. For fully remote workers the share is 10 points higher.
• Asked about the biggest risks to job security, more workers cite economic volatility (57%) than AI taking on more tasks (44%). Gen Z is more anxious across all of these measures.
• 58% of those who have experienced workplace change say there was more change in the last year than in previous years, and 27% say fatigue or burnout limits their productivity.
• Change is landing unevenly by level: 51% of senior executives and 46% of managers say they applied new skills in their roles, against 29% of non-managers and 38% of entry-level workers.

Pete Brown, PwC's global workforce leader, summed it up as "a real risk that the global workforce is starting to move at different speeds," with more than half of workers not yet benefiting from AI and skills in the same way, per the release and ITPro's coverage.

Why builders should care

If you sell AI tooling into companies, the 64% number is your market slide and the 51% number is your churn risk. Seat licenses bought for a workforce that never got trained tend to show up later as "low utilisation" in a renewal meeting.

• Onboarding is product. The survey says the majority of workers are not getting structured learning from their employer. A tool that teaches itself in the flow of work is filling a gap the buyer has stopped funding.
• The engine room is the volume. Front-runners will figure out any tool. The 56% who do the routine work are where adoption, and usage-based revenue, actually lives.
• There is a market in the gap. Falling L&D access alongside rising AI use is an opening for training products, internal enablement tooling, and workflow templates that do not assume a power user.
• Your best users are flight risks. If you run a small team, the person who has wired AI into everything is precisely the person PwC says is most likely to leave. Document what they built.

Caveats

This is self-reported survey data from a consultancy that also sells workforce transformation services, so read the framing with that in mind. "Used AI at work in the past 12 months" is a low bar: one prompt counts. The segments are PwC's own construct, and the daily-user comparisons are correlational. The year-on-year comparisons rely on the same survey series and weighting approach, which makes the direction of the changes more reliable than any single absolute number.

Key Takeaways

• PwC surveyed 49,364 workers in 48 countries and regions in May and June 2026.
• Workplace AI use rose 10 points to 64%, and daily generative AI use rose from 14% to 22%.
• Access to learning and development resources fell from 59% to 51%, and to roughly two in five for the 56% "engine room" majority.
• The 14% of "front-runners" with scarce skills and strong AI use are rewarded more, and 29% of them say they are very or extremely likely to change employer within a year.
• Daily AI users report more job security confidence (68% vs 57%) and more trust in management, but the survey cannot show which causes which.
• For anyone selling AI into workplaces, training and onboarding for non-expert users is the gap employers are leaving open.

Sources: PwC press release: Companies risk losing their most AI-savvy employees while leaving majority behind, The Next Web, ITPro