AI and the Workforce: An Inclusive Capitalism Perspective
By The Council for Inclusive Capitalism
September 10, 2026
The Stakes Are Already Here
AI is moving quickly, unlocking new opportunities for growth and innovation, and its long-term success will depend on whether workers and communities share broadly in the benefits it creates. In his 2026 Chairman’s Letter to Investors, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink warned that AI risks deepening inequality in advanced economies precisely because wealth there accumulates in assets rather than wages. That means the companies, investors, and highly skilled workers who can put AI to work at scale stand to gain the most, while everyone else is left to absorb the disruption. The scale of that disruption shows up in serious, data-driven modeling. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) puts AI exposure at 60% of jobs in high-income countries, 40% in middle-income countries, and 26% in low-income countries. That gradient tracks not risk alone but readiness: economies with less infrastructure and fewer worker protections are also least equipped to convert AI exposure into AI benefit. Boston Consulting Group’s research sharpens the near-term picture further, projecting that 50–55% of U.S. jobs will be significantly reshaped by AI within the next two to three years, with 10–15% of U.S. jobs potentially eliminated over five years or longer. These are not distant projections. AI is already driving innovation, improving productivity, and reshaping how work is performed. For most roles, AI is redesigning work rather than replacing it outright, as organizations use AI to streamline routine tasks, augment human capabilities, and create new opportunities for growth. At the same time, important risks remain, including unequal access to AI tools and training, declining job quality, weaker entry-level career pathways, and greater workplace surveillance. The choices made now by business leaders and policymakers will help determine whether AI concentrates economic advantage or broadens it. With thoughtful governance, sustained investment in workers, and greater alignment across sectors, AI can strengthen companies while equipping the workforce not only to adapt to this transformation, but to benefit from it.
Why the Council for Inclusive Capitalism is Focusing on AI
The Council for Inclusive Capitalism was built for exactly this kind of inflection point: when economic transformation creates an opportunity to align innovation and growth with broadly shared prosperity. The Council’s guiding principles offer a foundation for this moment: the belief that an economic system should be trusted, fair, responsible, dynamic, and sustainable, especially as AI reshapes how markets allocate labor and reward capital. Meeting these objectives depends on bringing business, labor, investors, and civil society to the same table—a new economic model no single sector could build on its own. The Council has done this work before. Its Just Transition Framework for Company Action—developed with Boston Consulting Group alongside seven global energy and energy-intensive companies, including ACEN, bp, and Eni, and six academic, investor, labor, and civil society partners, including CalPERS and the International Trade Union Confederation—offers a tested model for placing workers, communities, and consumers at the center of large-scale economic and technological change. Launched at COP26, it has since been adopted into guidance from GFANZ, the IFC, UNEP FI, and the UN Global Compact, and expanded well beyond energy into technology, finance, and food and beverage.
The Council has already convened the right people around the AI challenge. In 2025, the Council co-hosted a roundtable with World Bank President Ajay Banga, Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan, and Council CEO and Founder Lynn Forester de Rothschild, “Navigating the AI Transition: Creating Long-term Value and Inclusive Capitalism,” bringing together leaders from business, finance, labor, academia, and civil society to explore the opportunities and challenges of the AI transition. That work continues. The Council’s track record of centering workers during economic transitions, and its convening strength, position it to help shape how AI changes work by helping companies translate AI innovation into stronger performance, with workers sharing in the gains it creates.
The Council’s Position
The Council’s guiding principles call for an economic system that evolves and rewards innovation—one where workers are prepared for change, engaged in it, and able to share in the upside. Prior waves of economic transformation have often left behind workers and communities, eroding public trust in the institutions managing the change. This time, AI presents an opportunity to chart a better course where deliberate, worker-centered leadership strengthens both business performance and shared prosperity. To meet this opportunity, companies cannot measure success by adoption speed alone: they must use AI to augment work, upskill workers and improve job quality wherever possible and build genuine transition support wherever displacement cannot be avoided. It also requires measuring workforce outcomes with the same rigor applied to productivity gains, and determining—deliberately, not by default—how the value AI creates gets shared, whether through wages, profit-sharing, employee ownership, or broader access to capital. Determining who captures that value is where principle meets trust. Research from JUST Capital finds investors overwhelmingly expect AI to boost productivity, with most of the resulting gains flowing to shareholders. The public is far more skeptical that AI will deliver on productivity at all, and wants its gains directed toward worker support, safety, and affordability. That gap between investor expectation and public expectation is exactly the kind of divide the Council was built to close. That same gap shows up in how companies govern AI, not just how they talk about it. Business and investor attention to AI governance is rising, but recent data from the Thomson Reuters Foundation’s AI Company Data Initiative, a Council partner, tells a different story in practice. Nearly nine in ten companies have not publicly committed to any AI governance framework, and only about 12% have a policy ensuring human oversight of their AI systems. Fewer still, just 2.3%, have a dedicated complaints mechanism for AI-related issues, meaning most companies have no early-warning system for workforce risks as AI is deployed. That gap is precisely why a principled, workable standard matters now.
What’s Ahead
Building on this foundation, the Council is engaging companies, investors, and civil society leaders—through structured consultations, convenings, and partnerships—to surface where the persistent evidence gaps remain and what collective action can accomplish that which no single actor could achieve alone. That work continues this September, when the Council convenes stakeholders on this challenge alongside the 81st UN General Assembly in New York. The choices being made today on how AI enters the workplace will shape whether it becomes a tool for cost reduction at workers’ expense or a platform for shared prosperity. The Council for Inclusive Capitalism intends to keep bringing companies and investors together around that choice, with what’s at stake for workers front and center.
