The global economy faces four distinct futures by 2030, depending on how rapidly artificial intelligence advances and how quickly the workforce adapts, according to a white paper released this month by the World Economic Forum ahead of its annual event in Davos.
The report, Four Futures for Jobs in the New Economy: AI and Talent in 2030, warns that while global macro trends are projected to create 170 million new jobs by the end of the decade, they will also displace approximately 92 million existing roles.
This structural shift is driving deep uncertainty among business leaders. The Forum’s data reveals that 54 per cent of executives expect AI to displace existing jobs, while only 24 per cent believe it will create new ones.
“As artificial intelligence (AI) shifts from experimentation to integration, the pace and trajectory of its advancement deepen the uncertainty about its implications on businesses, workers and the global economy,” the report states.
The four scenarios
The white paper outlines four potential scenarios arising from the interaction between AI advancement and workforce readiness.
The most optimistic outlook, titled “Supercharged Progress”, envisions a world where exponential AI breakthroughs reshape industries and productivity soars.
In this future, widespread AI readiness enables workers to harness an “agentic leap” and adapt to AI-centric economies, partially containing displacement.
However, the report notes that even in this scenario, “social safety nets, ethics and governance frameworks struggle to keep up with the pace and scale of change”.
Conversely, the “Age of Displacement” scenario depicts a future in which technological advancement outpaces the workforce’s capacity to adapt.
The race to automate
Under these conditions, businesses race to automate as a stopgap, displacing workers faster than education systems can respond.
The result is a landscape where economies race ahead technologically but “fracture socially”, characterised by spiking unemployment and eroding consumer confidence.+1
A third scenario, the “Co-Pilot Economy”, sees the AI hype of the 2020s give way to pragmatic integration, with most industries seeing incremental transformation as human-AI teams reshape value chains.
The final possibility, “Stalled Progress”, depicts a world where steady AI progress meets a workforce lacking critical skills, leading to patchy productivity growth where businesses lean on automation to backfill scarce talent.
Workforce readiness gap
The urgency of the skills challenge is highlighted by LinkedIn data, which estimates that demand for AI literacy skills increased by 70 per cent between 2024 and 2025.
Despite the potential for productivity gains, only 12 per cent of executives expect AI to have a positive impact on wages, while more than four in 10 predict increased profit margins.
In the “Age of Displacement” scenario, the report warns that “automation has become significantly cheaper than mass upskilling and reskilling of workers”.
This could lead to a situation where “talent shortages have pushed some businesses to fully outsource decision-making to AI agents with limited to no oversight from human workers”.
Strategies for resilience
To navigate these diverging futures, the Forum has identified several “no-regret” strategies for business leaders, regardless of which scenario unfolds.
These include a “start small, build fast” approach to scaling successful experiments and a rigorous alignment of technology and talent strategies.
The report urges organisations to “invest in human-AI collaboration and agentic workflows”, noting that designing workflows that thrive on this collaboration will be critical to increasing trust and resilience.
“Human capital strategies and investments prioritised today will determine how well societies and individual businesses can adapt to – and lead in – the new economy,” the report concludes.
