June 16, 2026

PwC Report Suggests Users With AI Skills Are at a Premium for Employers: Key Takeaways for CX and Contact Centre Teams

UK hiring for AI-related roles surged 61% over the past year, rising from 112,000 positions in 2024 to 180,000 in 2025, indicating the evolving skillsets are at a premium for many industries and businesses. This transpired even as overall job vacancies across the economy fell by 6.6%. That is the headline finding from PwC’s 2026 Global AI Jobs Barometer, which analysed more than one billion job advertisements across six continents to map how AI skills are reshaping labour markets globally.

The report finds that the growth is not being driven by demand for model builders or machine learning engineers. Of the new AI roles created over the year, almost 66,000 went to what PwC calls “AI user” positions. These are people who work with AI inside existing business functions. Roles focused on AI development added just 2,600.

PwC identifies two categories of roles emerging from this change in course. “Professionalised” roles are those where AI handles routine tasks so that human judgement and expertise become the primary output. “Democratised” roles are those where AI mainly lowers the barrier to entry, making work accessible to less experienced workers. The former are growing at twice the rate of the latter, and command 42% faster salary growth.

The wage data underlines the divide. The average UK premium for workers with demonstrable AI skills has reached 34.2%, up from 11% a year ago. In consumer markets, employers are offering premiums as high as 64%. Government and public sector roles top out at 12%.

Joe Atkinson, Global Chief AI Officer at PwC, said:

“Across the global economy, we’re beginning to see a new divide emerge between different models for talent and value creation. The companies seeing the greatest returns on AI are using it to amplify human expertise, accelerate innovation and create entirely new sources of value.”

PwC also found a superstar effect among the most AI-capable companies. The top 20% of AI-exposed firms achieved average labour productivity growth of 163%. This was nearly five times higher than their AI-exposed peers. Headcount at these organisations also grew faster, up 52% relative to 2018 baseline levels, against 36% for those least exposed to AI.

What the Data Actually Tells Us About the Skills Premium

Naturally, PwC has a commercial interest in findings that position AI as a workforce opportunity rather than a threat, and that context is worth keeping in mind. However, the broad direction of the data is consistent with what other research has shown. Organisations are discovering that deploying AI and getting value from it are two different things, and the gap between them tends to be human.

The report’s entry-level findings are the most thought-provoking element. Analysing 2.4 million early-career job postings in the US, PwC found that AI-exposed roles are now seven times more likely to require skills, such as judgement, leadership, and face-to-face interaction. These have historically been associated with more senior positions.

“The traditional relationship between experience and expertise is changing,” added Pete Brown, Global Workforce Leader at PwC. “AI is removing some of the routine work that once acted as an apprenticeship, while increasing demand for judgement, leadership and adaptability much earlier in careers.”

This sits alongside less comfortable data points. Just last week, research from the Work AI Institute found UK office workers are spending nearly six hours every week checking and correcting AI-generated output. Meanwhile, a recent King’s College London survey found that one in five Britons believes AI-driven job losses could eventually trigger civil unrest. The hiring surge is real. So, in tandem, is the anxiety.

What the AI Skills Revolution Means for CX and Contact Centre Teams

The contact centre has more AI exposure than almost any other business function. Conversational AI, agent assist tools, and intelligent routing are mainstream now, not experimental. The PwC findings suggest that organisations seeing the best returns are not simply those with the most sophisticated tooling. Instead, they are the ones investing in the people working alongside it.

Moreover, the bar for what a good agent looks like is rising. If AI absorbs the transactional and retrieval work, what remains is the more complex, emotionally demanding, and commercially significant end of customer interaction. Teams that treat AI deployment as a workforce development question, not just a tech one, are feasibly better placed than those that do not.

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