AI Global 2026 Report

Source: Public First · 2026

2026 is the year AI moved from a handful of new apps to one of the most important drivers of the world economy. Anthropic's revenue grew roughly tenfold year on year, while OpenAI's more than doubled. Data centre construction has become a key — arguably the key — tailwind for US GDP growth. Meanwhile, economists continue to debate whether AI automation is already affecting entry-level jobs.

Ran polling across over 18,000 respondents across 15 countries. We sought the views of respondents in both advanced (Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Poland, Singapore, the UK and the US) and emerging (Brazil, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Nigeria, South Africa and Vietnam) countries, asking them widely on their views on AI.

On average, 45% of respondents believed that AI will change the world significantly - and 46% that it already had.

Even if the technology never changes from here, around half (47%) of the potential economic value over the next five years depends on the choices we make - how fast we adopt AI, and how prepared we are to use it in more sensitive areas.

By calibrating from how much workers in our survey were actually using AI to augment their tasks, we can get a better estimate of how far along we are - we estimate in 2026 we have seen only 8% of the potential economic opportunity.

Just 29% of people said they would be comfortable giving an AI agent access to their bank account.

1 in 5 said they have used an AI for emotional advice, and 1 in 6 that they have a relationship with an AI.

However, achieving AI’s full economic potential is not inevitable, and does not necessarily happen by default. Much of this remains within our control, and dependent on what choices we make to change workflows around it. In our modelling, we found that around half (47%) of the potential economic opportunity in the next five years is dependent on how prepared we are to take difficult choices to integrate AI going forward.

Roles where AI is a purely complementary force, with humans still needed for the highest-value part of the job — around 45% of occupations.

Roles where AI substitutes for the most valuable tasks, but humans are still needed for the less valuable ones — around 36% of occupations.

In our data, we see a clear drop for the US and UK, with associated feelings around AI growing clearly more negative. Net valence in the US has fallen from +0.73 to +0.18.

On the face of it, in our data, we saw clear support from a majority in nearly every country for a pause on AI development, with 56% agreeing.