Agents represent the next generational leap forward for AI, following the Generative AI revolution that has taken place over the past two years. Rather than simply answering questions, chatting or generating content (like ChatGPT), they are capable of taking action. This means carrying out complex multi-step tasks, interacting with third-party systems and working towards long-term goals with minimum human interaction.

In 2026, we’ll get more insight into whether this represents further progress towards true Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), AI with human-level adaptability, able to generalize learning from one task and use it to work out how to complete many others, just like humans do.

In our recent 2025 Work Trend Index Annual Report, we charted the emergence of the Frontier Firm—powered by intelligence on tap, run by human-agent teams, and defined by a new role for every employee, the agent boss. These firms are redesigning business processes around AI and agents to scale rapidly, operate with agility, and generate value faster than traditional companies.

But organizations will never complete their journey to becoming a Frontier Firm by concentrating on process alone. Our research, based on trillions of globally aggregated and anonymized Microsoft 365 productivity signals, reveals a challenging new roadblock: a seemingly infinite workday. 

Debido a la proliferación de sistemas, plataformas y aplicaciones de inteligencia artificial en el mercado laboral, el trabajo humano se está desplazando hacia la integración, monitoreo y analíticas de nivel superior. El trabajo de nivel medio ─roles técnicos rutinarios─ se está comprimiendo. Esto provoca que los trabajadores de cuello azul tengan que aumentar sus niveles de empleabilidad al ejecutar tareas en niveles cognitivos superiores o reubicarse en trabajos de menor cualificación y presumiblemente peor pagados.

El mercado laboral en Estados Unidos está viviendo un cambio histórico. Lo que antes parecía ciencia ficción, hoy es una realidad: millones de empleos están siendo reemplazados por la inteligencia artificial. 

¿Qué significa esto para ti?

• Profesiones enteras podrían desaparecer en menos de 5 años.
• Universitarios recién graduados ven cómo sus oportunidades se desmoronan. 
• Call centers, despachos de abogados y áreas administrativas ya están siendo sustituidos por algoritmos.

El informe del MIT titulado El Estado de la IA en las Empresas 2025, se basó en investigaciones preliminares del Project NANDA, en donde se detectó el fenómeno conocido como la Brecha de la IA Generativa. Esto se debe a que la IA Gen está siendo mayormente utilizada para ejecutar tareas individuales relacionadas con el marketing, en vez de implementarlas en desarrollo interno organizacional y en la solución de problemas con los flujos de trabajos de oficina.

El informe concluyó que la asignación de la inversión de la IA Gen estuvo fuertemente concentrada en funciones visibles de línea superior (top-line), a pesar de que las funciones internas (back-office) a menudo ofrecieron un mejor retorno de la inversión (ROI).

Artificial Intelligence tools are now playing a role in many aspects of life and society, spanning politics, the arts, work and beyond. While Americans express some openness to AI’s potential benefits, they’re concerned about its impact on some human abilities, according to a new Pew Research Center survey.

U.S. adults are generally pessimistic about AI’s effect on people’s ability to think creatively and form meaningful relationships: 53% say AI will worsen people’s ability to think creatively, compared with 16% who say it will improve this. An identical share (16%) says AI will make this skill neither better nor worse.

To study such patterns of early AI adoption, we extend the Anthropic Economic Index along two important dimensions, introducing a geographic analysis of Claude.ai conversations and a first-of-its-kind examination of enterprise API use. We show how Claude usage has evolved over time, how adoption patterns differ across regions, and—for the first time—how firms are deploying frontier AI to solve business problems.

Artificial Intelligence is moving beyond the role of a tool and beginning to act more like a colleague. The new wave of Agentic AI promises systems that can take initiative, anticipate needs, and collaborate in ways that feel closer to teamwork than automation. One of the clearest signs of this shift is happening in design and communication, where AI is starting to act as a creative partner rather than a simple utility.

Ruyu Chen, a postdoctoral fellow at the Digital Economy Lab of Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered AI. It isn’t just lack of experience that could make getting a job extremely difficult going forward; he notes too that the market may be tougher for those who are just average at their jobs. In the age of AI, only exceptional employees have an edge. “We’re going from mass hiring to precision hiring,” said Chen, adding that companies are starting to focus more on employing experts in their fields. “The superstar workers are in a better position”.

Cuando hablamos de la revolución de la IA, estamos mirando a los lugares equivocados.

Si bien la mayor parte del debate público en torno a la inteligencia artificial (IA) se centra en tareas creativas (escritura, generación de imágenes, modelado del lenguaje), una transformación más discreta, pero posiblemente más impactante, está en marcha. Una transformación que no se limita a los titulares, sino a las hojas de cálculo, las cadenas de aprobación y las unidades compartidas.

Se está desarrollando en el núcleo administrativo de las organizaciones, donde los agentes de IA (sistemas o programas que realizan tareas de forma autónoma en nombre de un usuario u otro sistema) están comenzando a asumir las tareas invisibles pero esenciales que mantienen a las empresas en funcionamiento.

This spring, tech executives began sounding the alarm that Artificial Intelligence (AI) is rendering entry-level office jobs obsolete—positions long relied on as training grounds for advanced skills and networks. Headlines have since warned that AI will break the bottom rung of the career ladder, and white collar jobs such as software developers may be among the first to be disrupted by AI, especially for younger workers. Other analysts predict that, over time, low-wage service workers may ultimately be the most severely impacted. 

The tech industry hasn’t always gotten AI right, but it has learned lessons the rest of the business world would do well to adopt.

For companies navigating the disruption of artificial intelligence, experts say the way tech firms approach innovation, risk, and organizational change holds key insights.

La automatización ya no es una predicción: es una realidad que está transformando el mundo del trabajo. Millones de empleos desaparecerán mientras otros nuevos surgen, y solo quienes se adapten sobrevivirán. En este video analizamos el gran reemplazo laboral: cómo la inteligencia artificial, la robótica y la automatización están reescribiendo el sentido del trabajo humano. Verás qué profesiones están en riesgo, cuáles emergen y cómo prepararte para no quedarte atrás. Una reflexión urgente sobre el futuro que ya comenzó.

Soon, every employee will have their own team: an ensemble of agents that can amplify impact and get work done on their behalf. Being an “agent boss”—someone who builds, manages, and delegates to agents—is set to become a key part of every job.  

In 2026, AI will continue to play an increasingly significant role in every part of our lives, and the workplace will be no exception. But just as important as learning to apply these powerful new tools will be understanding where uniquely human skills and judgement remain essential.

So here are the seven workplace trends I believe will affect all of us as companies adapt to technological change, shifting employee expectations and the new realities of the rapidly evolving world of work.

AI promises efficiency, scale, and predictive precision. And there are real gains being realized. Yet many organizations have traded understanding for output. Their enjoy their dashboards, reports are generated on demand, and decision-making is better informed, but comprehension has decayed. This decay arises not from technology itself but from a fundamental confusion about the nature of knowledge.

Leaders often claim to manage “knowledge assets” when they manage data streams. They speak of “knowledge sharing” when they circulate unexamined summaries. They celebrate “insight generation” when algorithms rearrange correlations. Such language mistakes the signal for the sense, the measurable for the meaningful. The result is organizational laziness disguised as sophistication.

Entry-level jobs are disappearing. The promise of AI’s workplace abilities and economic uncertainties have caused many companies to take pause while graduate-level unemployment is at an all-time high. What will the future of work look like if there are fewer starter jobs and middle management positions? Professional development and leadership pipelines will need to be redefined but how are companies doing it?

El informe de Udemy, Global Learning & Skills Report 2026 analiza la necesidad de transformar la fuerza laboral ante el auge de la IA y los cambios disruptivos que se avecinan. Argumenta que dominarla no es solo un objetivo técnico, sino que requiere una nueva mentalidad operativa y una redefinición sistemática de los procesos de aprendizaje. El informe aboga por un desarrollo de habilidades más práctico y contextualizado, en lugar de la formación tradicional (conferencias-talleres), para garantizar la retención de conocimientos y su aplicación real. Asimismo, destaca que el éxito en la implementación de la IA depende de un liderazgo eficaz, una ética sólida y la autonomía del personal para gestionar la incertidumbre y generar confianza. El documento sostiene que la verdadera ventaja competitiva para el éxito a largo plazo, más allá de la era actual de la IA, reside en la capacidad de adaptación continua, impulsada por habilidades esenciales como el pensamiento crítico.

MIT researchers studied 300 public AI initiatives to try and suss out the "no hype reality" of AI's impact on business, Aditya Challapally, research contributor to project NANDA at MIT, tells Axios.

• 95% of organizations found zero return despite enterprise investment of $30 billion to $40 billion into GenAI, the study says.
• Even firms that are now using AI are not seeing widespread disruption.

The trend has alarmed some job-market watchers. “Such an increase is unprecedented outside of recessions,” said an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, alluding to a steady worsening of the long-term unemployment rate. Economists at Goldman Sachs recently expressed concern that a collapse in the number of job openings “risks locking out” those who are already unemployed.

But just as surprising as the rise in long-term unemployment is the subset of workers who are increasingly driving it: the college educated. The fraction of long-term unemployed people with a college degree has grown from about one-fifth a decade ago to about one-third today, according to government data compiled by Matthew Notowidigdo and Jingzhou Huang of the University of Chicago. The problem has worsened over the past year or two after easing temporarily.

U.S.-based employers announced 47,999 job cuts in June, down 49% from May’s 93,816. It is down 2% from 48,786 announced in the same month last year, according to a report released Wednesday from global outplacement and business and executive coaching firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

The second quarter saw 247,256 job cuts, the highest Q2 total since 1,238,364 cuts announced in 2020. It is up 39% from the 177,391 cuts announced during the second quarter last year. It is down 50% from the 497,052 cuts announced in Q1.

The rise of Generative AI (GenAI) in knowledge workflows raises questions about its impact on critical thinking skills and practices. We survey 319 knowledge workers to investigate:

1. When and how they perceive the enaction of critical thinking when using GenAI?
2. When and why GenAI affects their effort to do so?

Participants shared 936 first-hand examples of using GenAI in work tasks. Quantitatively, when considering both task- and user-specific factors, a user’s task-specific self-confidence and confidence in GenAI are predictive of whether critical thinking is enacted and the effort of doing so in GenAI-assisted tasks.

Specifically, higher confidence in GenAI is associated with less critical thinking, while higher self-confidence is associated with more critical thinking. Qualitatively, GenAI shifts the nature of critical thinking toward information verification, response integration, and task stewardship. Our insights reveal new design challenges and opportunities for developing GenAI tools for knowledge work.

AI is reshaping how we work. It's also reshaping who thrives at work.

According to Cisco's 2024 AI Readiness Index, 85% of global business leaders believe they have less than 18 months to implement an AI strategy or risk falling behind. Yet, fewer than one in seven companies are fully prepared to adopt AI at scale. Even as companies increase investment, many are realizing they lack the infrastructure, governance and culture to fully unlock AI's value.

This report, developed in collaboration with the Global Finance &
Technology Network (GFTN), captures the perspectives of over 100 employers, collectively representing over 4 million workers across 18 industry clusters and 29 countries and territories. It provides a timely look into how AI is reshaping the workplace, how employers are responding, and what they expect from higher education to build an AI-ready workforce.

Meanwhile, Higher Education—a cornerstone of workforce
preparation—is falling behind. Only 3% of employers believe Higher Education institutions are adequately preparing graduates for an AI-driven workforce. Higher Education must urgently rethink its role, relevance, and curricula. This is a defining moment—one that calls for institutions to confront hard truths about their role in the evolving economy and take immediate action to close the widening gap between education and employment.

Preparing for the future of work demands shared responsibility.
Institutions, employers, and governments must act in collaboration, while individuals must take ownership of their growth—recognizing lifelong learning as a non-negotiable in an era of constant change.