AI, Labor, and the Economy

How can we ensure AI supports broadly shared prosperity?

AI has the potential to radically disrupt people’s working lives and material well-being in both positive and negative ways – AI tools could help discover medicines that increase lifespans while accelerating wealth concentration, or improve the yields of smallholder farmers while dramatically increasing inequality between countries. Labor and other organizations representing impacted workers or students, industry, civil society groups, everyday citizens and policymakers around the world have the power to determine what economic futures we see.

The AI, Labor, and the Economy Program convenes stakeholders from across PAI’s partner community to form shared answers and recommendations for steps that need to be taken now to ensure AI supports shared prosperity.

Shaping Economic Futures in the AI Era

It’s clear that AI will disrupt the economy, but there is little consensus over how work will be augmented or automated, the speed at which this transformation will occur, and how the benefits or costs will be distributed across society and across countries. PAI’s new initiative, Shaping Economic Futures in the AI Era, will leverage scenario analysis to identify actions stakeholders and policymakers can take today to increase the likelihood of positive AI outcomes and reduce the likelihood of negative impacts in the future. As part of this project, PAI will draw on three or four scenario briefing memos – being developed by the Windfall Trust in collaboration with PAI – exploring how AI may impact the economy in the next two to seven years. These memos provide both a global overview and a detailed look at the United States.

Program History

Since its founding in 2016, PAI has been at the forefront of helping diverse stakeholder groups understand how AI might impact workers and the economy, and how companies and workers can steer technology to benefit society.

• AI and Shared Prosperity Initiative: 23 notable thinkers from around the globe were brought together in the summer of 2020 to form the AI and Shared Prosperity Initiative’s Steering Committee, identifying key research gaps in Redesigning AI for Shared Prosperity: An Agenda for Research and Action. PAI’s researchers and collaborators addressed two of these gaps through two research papers: AI and Shared Prosperity, an economic framework to analyze the impacts of AI on the labor market; and AI and Job Quality: Insights from Frontline Workers, a multicountry study to understand workers’ perspectives on how AI affected their job quality. In 2023, we released a first-of-its-kind AI job impact assessment and recommendations for the AI industry, enterprise AI users, policymakers, and unions in the Guidelines for AI and Shared Prosperity. Developed in collaboration with a multistakeholder Steering Committee, these Guidelines served as a north star for the U.S. Department of Labor in 2024 when they recommended best practices for AI and worker well-being.
• Improving Conditions for Data Enrichment Workers: In June 2021, PAI called attention to new categories of work emerging in AI by releasing a whitepaper with recommendations to improve labor conditions for professionals who clean, label, or otherwise provide human judgment for AI training data. PAI followed this work with a collaborative case study with DeepMind, in which we identified key guidelines to improve conditions for data enrichment workers. Our data enrichment work was later cited as practice followed in the training data for Gemini 1.0. PAI also formed a Community of Practice among industry partners, and released draft vendor engagement guidance in 2024.