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.
Advertisement: Scroll to Continue
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 jobs people typically don’t pursue a four-year college degree for.
‘The Machines Are Coming’
Across both groups, most workers said AI hasn’t fundamentally altered their daily roles. Yet.
A May PYMNTS Intelligence report, “Financial Services Pulls Ahead in the Enterprise AI Race,” revealed that companies are rapidly introducing AI into their workflows and operations.
Financial services firms have scaled AI across nearly three times as many tasks as healthcare firms, concentrating their deployment in back-office functions like revenue recognition, credit risk assessment and sales forecasting, the report said. Healthcare is deploying AI through customer service chatbots. Media and advertising companies are using AI for content quality assurance, board and executive briefing preparation, and improving logistics.
Across 75 tasks spanning marketing and sales, supply chains, data and technology, product and customer experience, risk and compliance, corporate and strategy, HR and workforce, and payments and finance, financial services firms are using AI for 27 tasks, media and advertising for 16, and healthcare for 10, according to the report.
“There is a fear in your generation … that the machines are coming, that the jobs are evaporating,” Schmidt said, blaming fear-mongering on social media (and not dramatic corporate news of AI-fueled downsizing, like Block’s announcement that the technology was the reason it would slash 4,000 jobs, nearly 40% of its workforce). A February survey by Pew Research found that 35% of workers with a bachelor’s degree said they think AI will lead to fewer job opportunities for them in the future. The share of workers with a post-graduate degree who said they felt the same way was 24%.
Schmidt added that “we do not know the precise contours of what this transformation will look like” and that it “will require each of us to adapt in ways that we cannot anticipate.”
In other words, the educated consumers of tomorrow, and the companies that sell to them, should get used to radical uncertainty, at least for now. Employers are still figuring out how AI will shape their operations. In the end, workers can either get on board or not.
Chitra Nawbatt, an advisor to venture capital- and private equity-backed companies and a former Deutsche Bank executive, said she sees a growing disconnect between what workers are being told about AI-driven change and what is driving job cuts and career risk right now.
“In the context of a large company, the impact right now is microscopic,” she said in an interview. “A chatbot is not replacing the sales process. It’s not doing contract negotiation. All these companies have thousands of people and a maturation curve for every product, service line and function.”
That’s why she said she views Block CEO Jack Dorsey’s recent announcement crediting AI, not over-hiring, for downsizing as a misleading but “quick, popular narrative” among corporate executives.
The better question isn’t about quantifying how many jobs AI will replace, Nawbatt said. Instead, it’s about what new jobs will emerge across industries, products and services.
“Knowledge will be needed to embrace and use that technology,” she said.
Schmidt said that “if you don’t care about science, that’s OK because AI is going to touch everything else as well … the question is whether you will help shape artificial intelligence.”
But if training produces the knowledge needed to shape AI in the workforce, companies still have a lot of work to do.
The Atlanta branch of the Federal Reserve said in a March working paper that “AI’s near-term labor market effects are characterized less by aggregate job losses and more by shifts in tasks and occupational exposure across workers.” But it also noted a “lack of workforce training.”
The April PYMNTS Intelligence data showed that 53% of non-Labor Economy workers are confident they could find comparable-paying work if technology eliminates their roles. That’s nearly half of a pool of millions of workers who feel they couldn’t. As the technology evolves, 74% said they believe their skills will remain valuable. But what workers and employers think are two different things, especially as on-the-job training lags.
Likewise, if messaging produces the attitudes needed in the new workforce, AI advocates like Schmidt and companies still have a lot of work to do. According to Stanford University’s 2026 Artificial Intelligence Index Report, “AI experts and the public have very different perspectives on the technology’s future.”
“When someone offers you a seat on the rocket ship, you do not ask which seat. You just get on,” Schmidt said to boos. “Graduates, the rocket ship is here.”
Training employees how to fly the rocket ship is the next challenge.
For all PYMNTS AI coverage, subscribe to the daily AI Newsletter.