Rarely has so much been written about the future of work — and so little asked of the people living it. Last year, Indian software services firm Tata Consultancy Services cut more than 12,000 jobs, citing market unpredictability and disruptions from artificial intelligence. Its rivals Infosys and Wipro followed with hiring freezes and reduced intake. In these and other instances, the restructuring moved faster than any reskilling programme could.
That pattern is not unique to India’s IT sector. It is becoming the norm, even as institutions such as the World Economic Forum and the International Monetary Fund project millions of job displacements and significant disruptions globally from AI by the year 2030. What their forecasts miss is what workers want from the institutions managing this transition, and the systems needed to catch them if they fall.
A survey the Windfall Trust is publishing this week, conducted with the Collective Intelligence Project across more than 1,000 respondents in 60 countries, is an attempt to find out. We did not just ask people how they feel about AI; we asked them who they trust, what they want, and what a response would need to look like.
In India, which provided the largest share of respondents, 60% believe the technology reshaping their industries will reduce the availability of good jobs. And 40% expect their own roles to change fundamentally within a decade. One male respondent said, “These large companies only think about profit, that is why there is a high chance they will automate most of their work, resulting in an unemployment crisis which will eventually increase competition in non-AI affected fields.”
Across all 60 countries, only 9% trust national governments to distribute the economic gains from this transition fairly. Among respondents who describe themselves as financially struggling, only 40% believe those gains will reach them at all, against 59% of those who describe themselves as comfortable.
Given a choice between a guaranteed income and guaranteed jobs, the majority of respondents chose jobs.”
The most striking finding concerns what people actually want if displacement arrives at scale. Given a choice between a guaranteed income and guaranteed jobs, the majority of respondents chose jobs, including those already in financially precarious situations. This was held across every region. It pushes back directly on an assumption common in technology and policy circles that income support can substitute for meaningful work. The people choosing jobs were not only making an economic calculation, they were making a statement about what work means — not just as income, but as identity, routine, and a way of being part of something larger than oneself.
Both the regional variation and the similarities matter. In Southeast Asia, where 61% expect the economic benefits to reach them, 57% chose free public services over direct cash, a preference that held across every income group. In Kenya, 80% expect to benefit from the transition, the most optimistic figure in our survey. But their preferred delivery mechanism is direct digital channels, not traditional government institutions.
“We need systems that can deal with basic needs like health i.e. diagnosing diseases [and] agriculture, for example assisting farmers in deciding crops to plant on certain specific regions,” said a male survey respondent in Kenya.
Togo’s Novissi program offers a useful reference point: Its rapid rollout of digital cash transfers during the pandemic showed what is possible when governments invest in delivery infrastructure early, and how much still depends on local intermediaries to reach people the systems weren’t originally designed for.
The survey findings are not about optimism or pessimism. They are about which systems people trust to actually deliver, and the answer is consistently not the ones currently being designed with their input. When I attended the India AI Impact Summit in New Delhi earlier this year, the first major gathering of its kind held in a developing country, fewer than one in 10 sessions addressed labor markets or economic preparedness. The countries that may be better placed to absorb what is coming are those investing in preparedness now, before the disruption arrives. The real task is designing institutions and systems that respond to what people say rather than what decision-makers assume they want, and the survey suggests those two things are further apart than the policymakers — in New Delhi and elsewhere — have so far acknowledged.