The Next AI Boom Is Worker Training
The Next AI Boom Is Worker Training
https://www.pymnts.com/news/artificial-intelligence/2026/the-next-ai-boom-is-worker-training/
Publish Date: 2026-05-21 04:04:00
Source Domain: www.pymnts.com
When graduating seniors at the University of Arizona roundly booed a former Google CEO every time he mentioned artificial intelligence, the jeers annoyed the billionaire but failed to dent his conviction in the technology.
“The question is not whether AI will shape the world. It will,” Eric Schmidt said in a commencement speech Friday (May 15). “The question is whether you will help shape artificial intelligence.”
His certainty skipped over a big question. What are companies doing to train current and future employees on a technology Schmidt declared “will touch every profession, every classroom, every hospital, every laboratory, every person and every relationship you have”?
The answer, it turns out, is not enough.
An April PYMNTS Intelligence study, “Wage to Wallet™ Index – The Resilience Deficit: Labor Workers in an Automated Economy,” showed that nearly half of all workers in the United States in salaried or higher-paying roles received no on-the-job training on how to use AI tools, new technologies or automated processes in their roles in the last 12 months.
College graduates know how to use ChatGPT to write essays and Google Gemini’s Nano Banana to generate images and edit photos, but too few workers are getting too little guidance on how to use the technological tools increasingly penetrating the workplace.
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The report found that 48% of U.S. workers in educated professional and higher-paying roles, typically salaried, go to work each day and confront AI tools they’re not prepared to use effectively. These people, including engineers, designers, lawyers, doctors, product managers, managers and the like, are the counterpart to what PYMNTS Intelligence calls the Labor Economy. That term refers to warehouse associates, delivery drivers, restaurant and hotel staff, caregivers, construction workers, cleaners and the like, typically earning no more than $25 an hour or less than $50,000 a year. They’re…
