High earners race ahead on AI as workplace divide widens

Key topics:High-paid workers adopt AI far faster, widening inequality gapMen use AI more than women; training helps close gender gapAI boosts top professionals, but may reduce junior job opportunities.Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox every morning on weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa's bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here..By Madhumita Murgia and John Burn-Murdoch in London.The highest-earning and most experienced workers are adopting AI in their jobs far faster than others, in a divide that risks widening inequality as the technology spreads through the workplace.An FT poll of 4,000 workers in the US and UK shows adoption is heavily skewed towards the best-paid workers: more than 60 per cent use AI daily, compared with just 16 per cent of the lower earners.The data, the first release from a new AI workforce tracker produced by the FT and research company Focaldata, also points to a persistent gender divide, with men significantly more likely than women to use AI tools across sectors ranging from technology to education and retail.The monthly survey covers how workers are using AI, changes in productivity, barriers to adoption and impacts on the labour market. It offers a snapshot of how the technology is rippling across the US and UK — and who stands to benefit most..Read more:.FT: Are Anthropic’s new AI work tools game-changing for professionals?.“The rhetoric out there is that the tools are going to be democratising. But the reality is that . . . you require a certain degree of education, abstract and quantitative skills, familiarity with computers and coding in order to be using the models,” said Daron Acemoglu, Nobel laureate in economics and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.“AI is going to increase inequality between labour and capital. That is almost for sure. I would say it is setting us up for a . . . shitshow.” The poll showed that top-knowledge workers were the heaviest users of AI across white-collar jobs, but that the main differences in usage was between particular occupations rather than within them.Lawyers, accountants and software developers are using these tools at similar rates whether junior or senior but are using them much more than people in lower-paid occupations in the same industries.The strong relationship between pay, education and AI use suggests the technology may increase earnings inequality by boosting the productivity of workers at the top but not at the bottom.Economists pointed out that technically skilled, higher-agency workers were naturally early adopters of complex technologies.“The more intelligent technology we invent, the more your intelligence matters,” said Chris Pissarides, a Nobel Prize-winning professor of economics at the London School of Economics who has studied the effects of automation on jobs. “When the technology we invented was simpler, your IQ didn’t matter very much. But now it matters more and more with these more advanced technologies.” Economic historian Carl Benedikt Frey said the same pattern showed up during the personal computing revolution but the disparity evened out as computer use became widespread.“The inequality will sort itself out over time,” said Frey, professor at the Oxford Internet Institute. “It depends how long the gap takes to close, if it’s a decade or two, then it’s more worrying.”The gender divide is consistent with data showing women are 20 per cent less likely to use AI than men, according to Fabien Curto Millet, Google’s chief economist, although the causes remain unclear.There is scope to close that gap, he said, pointing to research from his team in 2025 that showed an AI training session for UK workers significantly increased adoption among women over 55. “The intervention led to a tripling of daily usage,” Curto Millet said.This aligns with the FT data, which shows corporate training is the single biggest driver of AI use at work.Experts were surprised by findings that the heaviest users of AI at work were not the youngest, but those in their thirties with longer tenures, indicating that AI may prove more useful to those with existing expertise.OpenAI’s chief economist Ronni Chatterji said this was consistent with the ChatGPT maker’s own observations that AI complements proficiency, allowing established experts to be more productive.The findings underscore the concern that AI may erode the bottom of the career pyramid, with some work previously done by junior staff now performed by AI at the behest of senior workers, leaving new staff unable to build up skills and expertise. Google and OpenAI acknowledged recent data showing a slowdown in the early career job market, although they pointed to macroeconomic factors rather than AI as the primary cause..Read more:.FT: How a former junior lawyer created a $5bn AI legal start-up.“We have to go back to the education system and think about how we’re going to set up the sort of incentives for people to acquire that kind of expertise, critical thinking,” said Chatterji. “You [need] the deep expertise versus being a substitute . . . where you’re outsourcing the thinking to a machine.”Poll detailsUK fieldwork was conducted between 26 February and 2 March 2026 with a sample size of 2,365. US fieldwork was conducted between 6 and 9 March 2026 with a sample size of 1,754. Data was weighted to be nationally representative by country, with weights by age, gender, region, education, ethnicity, political interest, and past election vote(s)..© 2026 The Financial Times Ltd.

High earners race ahead on AI as workplace divide widens

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