Global Survey Preliminary Findings: Perceptions of AI and the Future of Work (Nov 2025)

PREFACE

In October 2025, I commenced a part-time Doctor of Business Administration (DBA) at Warwick Business School in England, United Kingdom. Earlier that year, as an alumna of Harvard Business School, I attended a reunion event in June that featured a series of thought-provoking presentations and discussions on Artificial Intelligence (AI) —particularly Generative AI—and its growing impact across industries, leadership, innovation, performance management, and the future of work. The event proved deeply inspiring and sparked a profound curiosity to explore the subject further.

As a way of establishing a clear starting point for my research, I set out to understand public perceptions of AI and its perceived impact on ‘their’ future of work. In order to achieve this, a global survey was designed and launched on Monday, 20 October 2025. The survey targeted participants drawn from a combination of my personal and professional networks, as well as paid respondent panels accessed through Amazon MTurk and Clickworker. The questionnaire, available in 10 different languages, was developed to explore how individuals think of and relate to AI, focusing on the following categories:

• Definition of AI

• Perception of AI

• Trust and Regulation

• Adoption and Familiarity

• Impact on Jobs & Skills

• Future Outlook & Societal Impact

  
  

Preliminary survey results were analysed from over 5,300 unique human responses received 16 days later, on Wednesday 5th November 2025. Responses were gathered from across 54 countries, age groups, and industries to capture a holistic picture of how people understood, trusted, and anticipated the impact of AI on jobs, skills, and society.

SUMMARY OF FINDINGS

The below table summarises how survey respondents think of and relate to AI.

Across all categories, survey respondents viewed AI as an enabler, collaborator, and catalyst for creativity rather than a direct replacement for human labour.

Caution persisted around human oversight, trust and governance, but the prevailing perception of AI at the time of survey is one of shared cognition and pragmatic optimism.

EMERGING THEMES

YOUTH DRIVES COGNITIVE SYMBIOSIS

More than 90% of respondents were between 18 and 34 years old (Gen Z: 31%; Millennials: 59%), representing the demographic group that is poised to lead the future workforce. The results also suggest that the adoption of AI will accelerate the diffusion along the innovation S-curve, with this generation’s youth embracing and driving the next wave of innovation.

COLLABORATIVE COGNITION: TOMORROW’S WORKFORCE

The findings further revealed that most respondents viewed AI as a functional enabler of collaborative partnership, with 99% reporting the use of some form of AI in their daily lives. Additionally, 58% indicated that they actively use AI within their workplace. AI continues to evolve—from its current role as a functional enabler of human–machine collaboration toward increasingly cognitive and autonomous forms. As society progresses from narrow AI to general and ultimately superintelligent AI, these insights reinforce the argument that the traditional concept of a “worker” must evolve to encompass new forms of digital, augmented, and symbiotic contributors within the modern workforce.

CONCLUSION

The emerging themes support the argument that the notion of ‘the worker’ can no longer be confined to human effort alone. As digital and augmented systems increasingly contribute measurable productivity, organisations that account only for human full-time equivalents (hFTEs) risk significant value leakage. These results therefore reinforce the need to broaden workforce composition models to include augmented (aFTE), digital (dFTE), and symbiotic (sFTE) contributors — laying the foundation for rethinking how value is created, shared, and costed in the AI-enabled future of work.