Across the web: A collection of leading future of work research and reports from around the web

This Tony Blair Institute report explores the breakdown of Britain’s “opportunity bargain” with young people. It finds that one in ten are economically inactive rather than unemployed, with long-term sickness, driven primarily by mental health, now the dominant reason for inactivity.

This World Economic Forum report benchmarks the current state of gender parity across 145 economies. It reveals that, while gender parity has reached its highest level to date, significant gaps persist in economic participation and political empowerment.

This Deloitte survey reveals that generative AI use is widespread but still shallow, with most workers using it for familiar tasks rather than rethinking how work gets done.

This CIPD’s latest Good Work Index highlights the strong link between job quality and organisational performance and productivity.

McKinsey’s latest survey finds that, while AI is becoming embedded across organisations and is boosting productivity for most employees, many businesses are struggling to translate this into measurable financial gains, with the share of respondents reporting enterprise-level financial impact from AI use remaining unchanged from a year ago, at 37%.

The CIPD’s Summer 2026 Labour Market Outlook report reveals that UK employer confidence remains close to record lows outside of the pandemic and has shown no signs of recovery since spring 2025.

This ProAge and Ciphr report explores how organisations are responding to a workforce where people are working for longer, careers are becoming less linear, and four or five generations are working side by side. 

The OECD’s 2026 Employment Outlook report highlights the impact of geography on employment opportunities, career progression and living standards, finding substantial regional disparities in employment, unemployment and disposable incomes across OECD countries.

Drawing on insights from 8,800 business leaders and employees across four markets, Employment Hero’s latest report finds that AI-focused businesses are hiring more, not less, with 62% of AI-core firms growing their entry-level headcount over the past two years - more than double the rate of non-adaptors.

This McKinsey report finds that in an era of rapid AI disruption, competitive advantage will increasingly come from an organisation’s ability to effectively reallocate resources, test assumptions and adapt faster than competitors.

This Accenture report tracks how quickly the world’s 3,000 largest companies are building AI readiness – the essential capabilities that organisations need to extract maximum value from AI investments, including high-quality data, a skilled workforce, and focus on growth over efficiency.

This report by the World Economic Forum and PwC explores how AI is reshaping how organisations hire, develop and advance people, revealing that more than one in three young workers are employed in occupations with medium to high exposure to AI-driven task change.

O.C. Tanner’s 2026 State of Generations at Work report reveals a powerful opportunity to transform generational differences into generational synergy that fuels innovation and long-term business success.

This government report explores how AI capabilities could develop and affect security, geopolitics, the economy and society by 2030.

PwC’s 2026 AI Jobs Barometer reveals that AI is creating a two-track labour market with markedly different outcomes for workers and organisations.

This series of reports from the Department for Work and Pensions, in collaboration with Skills England, provide evidence-based guidance, real world case studies, practical principles and tools to help employers build inclusive, safe and sustainable AI workforce capability.

McKinsey’s HR Monitor report shows that the HR function stands at a turning point: from functional excellence to system-level transformation.

This 2026 Business Barometer reveals that the majority of UK organisations continue to face skills shortages and challenges despite employers increasingly benefitting from a looser recruitment market.

The Boston Consulting Group’s fourth annual AI at Work survey reveals that AI is changing jobs faster than companies are redesigning operating models to keep up.

This report from the Energy & Climate Intelligence Unit reveals that the UK's net zero economy has become a structurally embedded component of the national industrial base, generating over £105 billion in Gross Value Added and supporting 1.1 million jobs across the economy.

Bain & Company’s latest CEO survey finds a widening gap between where strategy is set and how it is delivered. CEOs are confident in their vision, but fewer than half believe their organisations can adapt and execute at the speed the market now requires, citing macroeconomic uncertainty, regulatory and geopolitical volatility and technological disruption as their top threats.

This IPPR report explores how AI could be deployed to augment, degrade or displace human labour and argues that the impact on workers is not inevitable but will depend on who holds power over how the technology is introduced and used in workplaces.

Microsoft’s 2026 Work Trend Index Annual report reveals that the most consequential change underway is not simply the adoption of new AI tools, but the emergence of a new operating model.

This Accenture report reveals how frontier AI capabilities, particularly the emergence of agentic AI, present a step-change opportunity to unlock frontline productivity and growth in the UK.

This KPMG report finds that 81% of executives say boards and owners have increased expectations for their organisations’ ability to adapt to disruption, but many leaders struggle to translate that ambition into action.

Stanford University HAI’s 2026 AI Index reports reveals that as AI continues to advance rapidly, governance frameworks, evaluation methods, education systems and the data infrastructure needed to track its impact are struggling to match the pace of the technology itself.

This report from Boston Consulting Group presents four scenarios for how the world may look in 2050 to help leaders identify early warning signs and tactical moves that will build resilience and secure advantage in the face of uncertainty.

Gallup’s latest State of the Global Workplace report reveals that employee engagement fell to 20% in 2025, its lowest level since 2020 and costing the world economy an estimated $10 trillion in lost productivity.

This Accenture report reveals that AI’s enterprise-level financial impact is backloaded, as organisations confront decades of data debt, brittle systems, undocumented processes and outdated skills.

This Accenture report explores how the use of AI has shifted from simple augmentation, where AI supports a task, to co-intelligence where AI can interpret intent, reason through options, coordinate steps and execute bounded work across functions at machine speed.