RESEARCH REPORT
The economics of reinventing work and the workforce
5-MINUTE READ
March 17, 2025
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.
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.
