Pew: 34 of 37 countries expect AI to cut jobs

Pew Research Center published its global AI survey today, and the headline on AI and jobs is not close. In 34 of 37 countries surveyed, people tend to believe AI will lead to fewer jobs rather than more. If you are about to tell your team that the new automation is "not about headcount," understand that you are arguing against the prior belief of most people in the room.

What actually happened

Pew surveyed 42,151 people across 36 countries between February 8 and May 13, 2026, with separate U.S. samples of 5,119 adults in February and 3,488 in June. The job question was framed over the next 20 years.

The split by wealth is sharp. A median of 55% of adults across 18 high-income countries say AI will lead to fewer jobs, against 36% across 18 middle-income countries — where much larger shares say they are unsure. In Australia, South Korea and the United States, around seven in ten adults or more expect job loss. U.S. concern about AI-driven job loss is up 7 percentage points in two years.

The generational trend is the one worth sitting with. Since 2024, the share of Americans aged 18 to 34 who are more concerned than excited about AI jumped from 40% to 55%. That is the age band doing most of the hands-on work in a small company. Across all 37 countries, a 37% median say they are more concerned than excited; in high-income countries it is 40% against 31% in middle-income ones. Awareness tracks the same line — a median of 50% in high-income countries say they have heard a lot about AI, versus 27% in middle-income countries.

Why AI job anxiety matters for your business

We build automation for small companies, so we will say the uncomfortable part plainly: this data is a deployment risk, not a moral debate. A team that expects AI to take jobs will not report the edge cases where your agent is wrong. They will not flag the invoice it misread. They will route around the tool quietly, and you will find out three months later when the numbers stop reconciling. Automation that nobody wants to babysit fails in exactly the ways that cost money.

What works is specificity. Not "AI will free you up for higher-value work" — that sentence is why 55% of under-35s are worried. Name the task. "The bot drafts the first pass at supplier emails; you approve every one before it sends; here is the log of what it drafted this week." People trust a system they can inspect and override. The Pew numbers say the same thing from the outside: awareness and concern rise together, and the audience with the most exposure to AI is the most skeptical. They have earned it.

The customer-facing version is identical. Disclose that a bot answers your chat. Give a one-click path to a human. A visible handoff costs you nothing and removes the thing people actually resent, which is being fooled.

Sources: Pew Research Center: Globally, More People Expect AI to Cause Job Loss Than Growth, Pew Research Center: Concerns about AI are especially widespread in high-income countries.