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The global chair of PwC shares 3 takes on what AI means for jobs

Business Insider – Tech

1d ago

The global chair of PwC shares 3 takes on what AI means for jobs

Summary

Mohamed Kande is the global chairman of the Big Four firm PwC. Bloomberg/Getty Images PwC's chief, Mohamed Kande, shared his three key thoughts on AI and job disruption. Kande said companies that adopt AI at scale are adding jobs, not cutting them. PwC's recent 2026 global jobs barometer found that entry-level roles highly exposed to AI have flatlined. Mohamed Kande, the global chairman of PwC, has an optimistic take on what AI means for jobs . In an interview with CNBC's Squawk Box at the VivaTech conference in Paris on Thursday, he summarized three ways he thinks AI is reshaping the labor market. You've probably heard similar points from CEOs and AI leaders before, some of whom initially predicted a white-collar job wipeout, but many of whom have since shifted how they talk about displacement , emphasizing augmentation over replacement. Jack Taylor/Getty Images Kande's comments echoed some of the findings published this week in PwC's 2026 global jobs barometer , which analyzed over 1 billion job advertisements globally. In its report, PwC said the divergence is creating a two-tier workforce between companies that are using AI to amplify workers and those that have yet to embrace it. Entry-level hiring Fears around AI job displacement tend to focus on junior white-collar workers , as they typically handle the kind of work AI is now taking over: repetitive, data-intensive, and research-heavy tasks.

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Mohamed Kande is the global chairman of the Big Four firm PwC. Bloomberg/Getty Images PwC's chief, Mohamed Kande, shared his three key thoughts on AI and job disruption. Kande said companies that adopt AI at scale are adding jobs, not cutting them. PwC's recent 2026 global jobs barometer found that entry-level roles highly exposed to AI have flatlined. Mohamed Kande, the global chairman of PwC, has an optimistic take on what AI means for jobs . In an interview with CNBC's Squawk Box at the VivaTech conference in Paris on Thursday, he summarized three ways he thinks AI is reshaping the labor market. Companies adopting AI "at scale" are increasing their headcount, not cutting it, he said. "They're increasing the number of workers that they need because they are embracing AI." Second, Kande said that employees are becoming more valuable the more they use AI, adding that the technology gives them "superpowers." In the AI age, workers should focus on developing soft skills like EQ, judgment

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Gen Z grad landed a job at LinkedIn by waitressing at a conference full of recruiters and handing out her résumé during breaks—now she works at Google

Basant Shenouda spent six months after graduating from one of Germany’s top universities sliding into recruiters’ DMs on LinkedIn and applying for jobs online—and getting ghosted. So she volunteered to waitress at a conference six hours away, where she handed her résumé to 40 recruiters and landed a job at LinkedIn. Now she’s at Google . “It is becoming harder and harder to reach the hiring manager, even virtually—which used to be a more nontraditional method,” the Egyptian-born Gen Zer who graduated from the University of Bonn in 2019 tells Fortune . “It’s incredibly hard to spotlight yourself.” It’s a feeling many graduates know well. With more than a billion users on LinkedIn, overloaded recruiters are increasingly ignoring messages from strangers—so Shenouda switched tactics, using the platform not to cold-message hiring managers, but to track which conferences they were posting about. Not only did she draw up a hit list of conferences that hiring managers at her dream employers were going to be at, but she also went face-to-face with those who had rejected her advances online—LinkedIn’s recruiter being one of those. “I gained feedback from all the companies that rejected me, which allowed me to reapply and get job offers,” Shenouda says. “It really brought me a lot of insight into how I can better distinguish my applications and what gaps I needed to fill to ensure that I made it past the final interview rounds. “Traditionally, people don’t reapply; people don’t keep trying and keep reaching out to people and keep maintaining a relationship. “They [the recruiter] thought those were really good transferable skills for sales, and that’s what I ended up doing.” Even if you’ve made every effort to ensure that you’re showing up at all the places hiring managers are, it doesn’t guarantee you’ll actually get any leads. Here are some tips she learned along the way to convert networking from just chitchat into something more tangible, like a job interview or offer: Don’t worry if promoting yourself to strangers doesn’t come naturally. “I was really bad at networking before,” Shenouda recalls. Talk metrics. “Now I know how to get someone’s attention,” she says, adding that that looks like “talking about impact instead of just saying, ‘I want a job.’” Looking back at the elevator pitch that landed her her current role, the Gen Zer says she talked about her wins during a previous internship at Intel . Likewise, don’t be afraid to outline what you want following a conversation with a recruiter. “I’d always ask the specific question: if they can refer me (for a job), or if they have feedback based on my résumé, or my past interview experience with the company,” Shenouda adds. Want to know which metrics will stand out to the hiring manager at your dream job? Even those with hiring powers are people at the end of the day, with lives outside work.

The Great Recession’s missing children are finally bringing college’s financial crisis into sight. Welcome to the ‘enrollment volatility’ era

Universities and colleges across the country have been dealing with a ticking time bomb since the Great Recession, and a growing number of them are saying that it’s about to go off, next semester. A series of announcements over the past month by the highest offices of U.S. universities read like an obituary to a higher learning model that no longer works for either students or the institutions tasked with teaching. And that obituary has been authored in slow motion by the declining birth rate of the last two decades. “Enrollment volatility is widespread, unpredictable and the ‘new normal’ for even strong, well-resourced universities,” J. Michael Haynie, Syracuse University’s chancellor, wrote in a note to faculty and staff last week, announcing the school had missed its undergraduate enrollment target for the next fiscal year. “The fall 2026 enrollment shortfall carries real financial consequences—including a budget deficit, something the University has not experienced in quite some time,” he continued. Many more schools are being forced into similar write-downs as enrollment plummets. In fall 2025, total post-secondary enrollment in the U.S. rose 1% , down from a 4% increase measured the year before, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. At private four-year institutions, enrollment last year dipped 1.6%. A demographic clock determining college-aged student supply started ticking 18 years ago in the wake of the Great Recession, when insecure American households decided to put off having children. But though many university provosts and presidents have pointed to geopolitical and policy factors Baum cautioned against interpreting the enrollment cliff as a cyclical struggle, particularly for smaller schools who are struggling to keep domestic enrollment numbers up anyway. “There’s a decline in the number of high school graduates in this country,” she said. “This is not a surprise. We’ve seen this coming for a long time, but we’re now sort of getting to the point where it’s actually happening.” Researchers have been predicting a demographic cliff for college-aged Americans ever since families started having fewer babies two decades ago, around the time of the Great Recession.

The global chair of PwC shares 3 takes on what AI means for jobs

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