Almost one in three people (31%) expect their job either to be unrecognisable or to disappear completely by the end of the decade, twice the share who held that view just 18 months ago.
This is among the findings of a YouGov poll of 1,891 employees for Accenture. The survey, which is published in Accenture’s Generating impact report, found that over three-quarters (79%) of workers expect they will need to reskill and over half (55%) say they are likely to change occupations.
According to Accenture, there is a risk that organisations are not yet providing enough clarity or support to facilitate this transition at scale. Just 26% have conducted a skills audit to assess artificial intelligence’s (AI’s) impact on roles. Meanwhile, 27% do not provide AI-related training at scale, and only 30% are investing in reskilling and redeployment pathways for at-risk roles.
In 2024, only one-third of executives believed AI would shrink the national workforce, but now almost half of business leaders (49%) expect AI will reduce national employment over the next decade.
As the authors of the Accenture report note, if business leaders assume displacement is inevitable, the incentive to invest in workforce transition weakens. They warned that translating AI-driven efficiency into inclusive growth through reskilling, job creation and new forms of work remains a key challenge.
Accenture reported that in 2024, 40% of executives expected AI to increase demand for entry-level roles. This has now collapsed to 15%. The share expecting reduced demand has risen from 22% to 37%, which, according to Accenture, shows that business leaders are likely to deploy AI instead of hiring new people to fulfil entry-level and junior roles, which constricts the skills pipeline where people are hired and provided with training.
Beyond the reduction in junior positions that could occur as AI gains traction, more than half of UK workers (54%) have the appetite to reskill in response to AI. However, only 7% of executives say their workforce is fully prepared for agentic AI.
Accenture also reported that AI is taking place outside formal company systems, with 24% of workers sourcing tools themselves. The survey found that employees are adopting AI at the level of individual tasks, but organisations have not yet redesigned the systems and workflows around them.
Only around a quarter of employees say a major process in their team has been redesigned around AI in the past year. The authors of the report stated that without that redesign, productivity gains remain localised and fail to translate into enterprise performance. They warned that siloed implementation of AI leads to a two-speed organisation, where some functions operate with AI-enabled productivity, while others work as they always have.
Matt Prebble, head of Accenture in the UK and Ireland, said: “AI’s productivity impact now sits at the heart of the UK’s economic resilience, not just business performance. While AI has officially joined the workforce, people are moving faster than their organisations.
“Personal productivity gains are visible, but unless workflows and operations are reinvented to scale AI, they can’t be translated at an organisational level,” he added. “Turning AI adoption into economic value now depends on rethinking how work gets done.”
