Insights
AI Is Splitting the Job Market in Two, PwC Study Shows
External news — summarised for Oxydata Insights. Read the full story on The Star (Bloomberg, 17 Jun 2026).
PwC's 2026 AI Jobs Barometer draws on more than one billion job postings across 27 countries. The headline finding: AI is pulling the labour market in two directions — rewarding organisations that use it to amplify human expertise, while those focused mainly on cost-cutting automation fall further behind on productivity and growth.
What stood out for hiring and HR
- Roles requiring AI skills grew almost eight times faster than the overall job market in 2025, with a widening wage premium (62%, up from 57% the year before).
- Jobs where AI amplifies human skills — creativity, judgment, ethics — are rising fastest. PwC names recruiters alongside radiologists and air traffic controllers as examples.
- Roles where AI makes work easier for non-experts (e.g. some IT service manager and medical secretary tasks) are seeing much slower growth.
- Entry-level positions increasingly demand competencies that used to sit with senior staff: judgment, empathy, leadership, adaptability. "Non-seniorised" entry roles without those skills have shrunk about 10% since 2019.
- Despite fears of displacement, PwC reports that greater AI exposure correlated with faster headcount growth, not mass job losses — especially for firms using AI to create value, not only to cut headcount.
Why this matters in Malaysia
Malaysian HR and recruitment teams are already balancing volume hiring, PDPA compliance, and stakeholder expectations. This study reinforces a practical framing we see on the ground: AI is not a substitute for recruiters who own judgment, relationships, and quality — it is leverage for teams willing to redesign workflows around screening, documentation, and follow-up.
If your leadership is asking whether AI will "replace" recruiters, the PwC data points to a more nuanced answer: routine work compresses; human expertise gets more valuable, earlier in careers.
Read the source
Source: PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, 2026 AI Jobs Barometer; reported by Bloomberg via The Star.