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.

This BCG report, drawing on insights from more than 7,000 HR and business leaders, examines the biggest people management priorities for HR leaders today. It highlights that for CHROs, AI creates tremendous new opportunities – along with greater pressure to deliver results.

This WTW report reveals the APAC salary landscape enters 2026 in a state of stable yet significant transition. While median salary increases held steady at 4.9%, there is a narrowing gap between the market median and upper quartile signalling that differences across industries and companies are beginning to compress and reflecting more disciplined and converging salary increase strategies.

This Accenture report reveals the real value from AI emerges only when people and technology advance together. Based on a survey of 1,320 C-suite executives and 4,560 employees across 20 industries and 12 countries, the research identifies an elite group – just 18% of organisations – called “Talent Reinventors” that are taking a distinctively integrated approach to talent and delivering measurable value.

This white paper from the WEF, in collaboration with Accenture, examines how leading organisations are embedding AI across customer experience, operations, R&D, strategic and workforce planning.

This Anthropic report presents a new framework for understanding AI’s labour market impacts, and tests it against early data, finding limited evidence that AI has affected employment to date.

This ILO research brief reveals that the impacts of generative AI on the world of work are not gender-neutral, finding that female-dominated occupations are almost twice as likely to be exposed to Gen AI as male-dominated ones.

Deloitte’s 2026 survey reveals the two most important drivers of success for business leaders are accelerating how people and resources are orchestrated to perform work and increasing their organisation’s and workforce’s ability to adapt to change and speed.

PwC’s annual Women in Work index examines trends in female participation, employment and progression across 33 OECD countries.

The CIPD’s latest Labour Market Outlook finds that employer confidence remains subdued, with hiring intentions at historically low levels outside the pandemic.

New research by the Institute for the Future of Work’s Nuffield-funded Pissarides Review, in partnership with Digit, underscores the central importance of investing in institutional structures such as HR policies and worker voice to ensure new technologies such as AI reduce barriers to mobility and raise pay – especially for those on the lowest wages.

This Upwork report explores how AI skills are reshaping existing roles, finding a trend towards job recomposition rather than mass replacement.

Deloitte’s 2026 State of AI in the Enterprise report find that while wider workforce access, early productivity gains and growing confidence in AI are accelerating adoption, a gap remains between experimentation and true enterprise transformation. 

This report by the World Economic Forum, in collaboration with Accenture, presents MINDS – Meaningful, Intelligent, Novel, Deployable Solutions – alongside a series of insights to guide organisations in their journey towards building resilient strategies for the future and scaling up impactful AI adoption. 

Insights from the KPMG Q4 AI Pulse Survey reveal business leader priorities that will drive agents into the enterprise in 2026, led by continued investment in technology and critical foundations, from the workforce and cybersecurity.

Edelman’s 2026 Trust Barometer explores how economic uncertainty, unmitigated fears and pessimism are driving an insular trust mindset, finding that 70% of people globally are hesitant or unwilling to trust someone who has different values, information sources, approaches to societal problems or backgrounds to them.

This report by the World Economic Forum explores how AI advancement and talent trends, and their potential trajectories until 2030, could transform the future of jobs.

This LinkedIn report reveals a labour market showing signs of growth, fuelled by the more than 1.3 million jobs globally that have emerged due to new technology and broader workforce shifts.

This World Economic Forum report analyses global risks to support decision-makers in balancing current crises and longer-term priorities. It reveals that geoeconomic confrontation has emerged as the top global risk in 2026, with economic risks showing the sharpest rises among all categories in the short-term. 

The International Labour Organisation’s 2026 Employment and Social Trends report examines the state of global labour markets, highlighting stable headline employment alongside stalled progress in job quality and widening inequalities. 

PwC’s latest Global CEO Survey reveals that chief executives are significantly less confident about the short-term growth outlook for their companies and more worried about a range of threats, including macroeconomic volatility, cyber risk and geopolitical conflict, yet are at the same time pressing ahead with multiyear strategies to reinvent their businesses.

This Time article explores the profound implications of rising life expectancy and an ageing population, arguing that the traditional three-stage life of education, work and retirement is now obsolete.

This Gartner report reveals the nine future of work trends that chief human resources officers (CHROs) will need to address in 2026 and beyond to ensure their organisation achieves its desired talent and business outcomes. It finds that CEOs are setting bold growth targets fuelled by the promise of AI, yet only one in 50 AI initiatives delivers transformative value. 

This IBM report reveals how the most advanced enterprises across the Asia-Pacific region are shifting from experimental AI pilots to AI-powered business model reinvention.

This paper by KPMG examines the emergence of new organisational roles and capabilities required to integrate AI agents as digital teammates, so that C-suite executives, CHROs and transformation leaders can effectively orchestrate human-digital collaboration. It reveals that by proactively creating and evolving new positions – ranging from AI architects and trainers to governance and ethics leaders – organisations can unlock the full value of digital teammates while enabling and empowering human talent to excel in strategic, creative and oversight functions. Success will depend on clear planning, continuous adaptation, and a commitment to responsible innovation – ensuring resilience, agility, and a sustainable competitive edge in an AI-drive future.

This World Economic Forum report explores how the powerful interplay between geopolitical shifts and rapid technological change is reshaping the global economic landscape. It presents four distinct futures for 2030 that emerge from different trajectories of geopolitical stability and technology adoption and offers a structured lens to understand how forces such as AI commercialisation, supply chain reconfiguration, regulatory fragmentation and rising volatility may influence growth, labour markets, trade and business competitiveness. The report concludes with a set of strategy considerations to help businesses prepare today for any scenario.

The World Economic Forum’s New Economy Skills series provides guidance on the skills that should be prioritised to ensure business and economies have the talent to deliver on innovation, resilience and growth priorities.

PwC’s Youth Employment Index tracks how countries employ and train young people, with this year’s focus on rising economic inactivity and the impact of widespread AI adoption in the workplace. It finds that the UK has dropped to 27th out of 38 OECD countries, reflecting a combination of rising youth unemployment - now at its highest level since 2020 - and higher levels of economic inactivity. A growing share of young people in the UK are inactive, driven by a larger pool of students and three-times as many inactive due to long-term sickness than in 2005, with mental health conditions identified as a key driver. The data does suggest that AI is unlikely to be the driving force behind the rise in youth unemployment, but early signs are emerging in AI-intensive sectors. With 1 in 8 people now classified as NEET, the report estimates reducing regional disparities in youth employment could boost GDP by around £13-26 billion. And for businesses, the challenge is shifting: it’s less about filling vacancies, and more about identifying and developing the talent needed to meet the demands of a changing workplace.

This Microsoft report explores how AI is shaping work, with the fifth annual edition focussing on “collective productivity”, namely how teams, organisations and communities can get better together.

McKinsey and LeanIn.Org’s latest Women in Workplace report reveals that only half of companies are prioritising women’s career advancement, part of a several-year trend in declining commitment to gender diversity and for the first time, there is a notable ambition gap: women are less interested in being promoted than men. It highlights that when women receive the same career support that men do, this gap in ambition to advance falls away, yet women at both ends of the pipeline are still held back by less sponsorship and manager advocacy. As AI continues to transform the workforce, the report emphasises that leaders must ensure that all employees, including women, have equal access to support, encouragement and the tools needed to thrive in a rapidly evolving environment. By addressing bias in AI systems and intentionally investing in inclusive leadership, fairness and connection, companies can unlock the full potential of their people and the technology they adopt.

This OECD report explores how countries can build the 21st-century skills needed to sustain growth and social progress.