RESEARCH REPORT
Humans, AI and Robots:
The economics of reinventing work and the workforce
5-MINUTE READ
March 17, 2025
In brief
- Executives can use AI to drive transformative growth and innovation, reshaping the future for individuals, economies, organizations and society.
- Accenture and the Wharton School are launching a research initiative to guide executives in navigating the agentic age with responsibility and purpose.
- Leaders who navigate AI transformation with purpose, empathy and focus can surpass financial goals and enhance human performance.
As AI technologies proliferate, industry leaders have a unique opportunity—not just to enhance efficiency but to unlock entirely new paradigms of individual, economic, organizational and societal value. The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and Accenture are launching a global research initiative to help these leaders understand why and how to achieve that impact at scale. Our focus: understanding how a future shaped by the deep integration of human strengths with generative-AI-powered agents and robots can fundamentally redefine work across industries. Our goal: Provide a robust fact-base and a suite of action-oriented insights to help executives architect this transformation—not as passive participants but as designers of a new economic and organizational reality.
Early hypotheses and insights from Wharton and Accenture’s latest findings offer our starting point and a preliminary roadmap for executives and policymakers seeking to navigate the agentic age with responsibility and purpose.
Individuals
The ‘art of the possible’ in human-AI collaboration is rapidly evolving. Organizations have an opportunity to amplify intelligence and adjust capacity by integrating human insight with AI precision and robotic efficiency. This integration requires a clear understanding of the challenges AI is uniquely suited to address, the areas where human expertise excels, and the circumstances that benefit most from a purposeful and collaborative blend of both. It also involves preparing individuals to lead their own agentic and robotic teams and equipping them for that future, while continuously applying this knowledge across the enterprise as these factors evolve.
Economics
The economics of work and workforce will shift in concert with the proliferation of gen-AI-powered digital and robotic agents. To manage these dynamics well, business leaders must first understand the economic impact of each workforce component—on individuals, operational teams, functions and sub-functions, as well as across the value chain. Then, they need to anticipate and optimize the overall effects of these impacts on the company’s financial statements, including profitability, asset efficiency and return on invested capital (ROIC). The C-suite’s ability to balance value against cost, while prioritizing the human experience at work, will push some companies far ahead of others in performance and profit.
Organizations
For businesses to develop their “change muscle”—the ability to maximize the interplay between human ingenuity, AI and robotics capabilities—executives must lead in new ways by becoming architects of continuous change, ensuring the company is always future-ready. This will call for a new approach to talent, incorporating predictive workforce planning, prioritizing adaptability over fixed skillsets and implementing AI-driven, personalized learning. It will also require continuously testing and refining the balance between human and AI contributions. To succeed, organizations will need the trust of their people, so leaders must create an environment where people can do work they love in a way that supports innovation and growth.
Society
As with the industrial revolution and other major technological shifts, this emerging transformation will have broad impacts on society. Questions are already arising about anticipated imbalances in skills and labor, the need for educational and corporate training reforms, geographic and geopolitical impacts, human dignity and autonomy, socio-economic gaps, discrimination and bias. These challenges highlight the need for alignment across four key areas: corporate governance policies and standards (both within and across industries); governmental regulations (cross-industry and cross-border); the processes and practices needed to adapt the human workforce to a new approaches to work (across educational systems and enterprise training); and the responsible and ethical rules and guiderails (that will direct the use of these technologies at scale). If business, government and institutional leaders collaborate with intent and purpose, the transformation of work can significantly benefit society as a whole.
Through our new research, we aim to understand the economics of the combinatorial workforce—humans, autonomous agents, and robots—and identify ways to reimagine work at the individual, functional, and value chain levels, aligning with the deployment of this new workforce.
We aim to uncover effective ways of pairing human creativity, empathy and judgment with the precision and scale of digital agents and robots within agentic teams. By doing so, we expect to demonstrate how the most successful companies of the future will redefine the nature of workforce economics and achieve a new level of performance. These companies will be well-prepared for continuous change, recognizing that a sustainable economic advantage involves not only efficiency but also the strategic creation of new value. Additionally, they will balance fiscal responsibility with a commitment to prioritizing people’s wellbeing and sense of purpose.
Success depends not on reacting to change, but on designing it—strategically, thoughtfully and with a relentless focus on shared value. Please reach out to the authors if you would like your organization to contribute to this important endeavor.
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