PwC's global chairman Mohamed Kande doesn’t believe companies adopting AI are laying off

The man running a 370,000-person firm has a message that cuts against the white-collar doom narrative: AI isn't gutting payrolls, it's padding them. Mohamed Kande, global chairman of PwC, told CNBC's Squawk Box at the VivaTech conference in Paris on Thursday that companies deploying AI "at scale" are hiring more people, not fewer. His reasoning is blunt: firms embracing the technology need more workers, not less, to make it pay off. It's a claim worth sitting with, partly because Kande sits at the helm of a Big Four firm on the front lines of how AI is rewiring work, and partly because plenty of executives spent the past two years predicting the opposite. The 'superpowers' pitch, and why soft skills suddenly matter Kande's second point leans optimistic. Employees, he argued, get more valuable the more they use AI, which hands them what he called "superpowers." His advice for surviving the shift isn't to learn prompt engineering. It's to double down on EQ, judgment, and collaboration—the human stuff machines still fumble. The third takeaway followed naturally: AI won't necessarily replace jobs, but it will reshape what countless roles look like. You've heard versions of this before. Several CEOs and AI leaders who once forecast a white-collar wipeout have quietly pivoted to talk of augmentation over replacement. What PwC's billion-job barometer actually found The optimism isn't just talk. Kande's comments echoed PwC's 2026 Global Jobs Barometer, released this week, which analysed over a billion job advertisements worldwide. Headcount at the most AI-exposed companies grew 52% since 2018, against 36% at the least-exposed. Wages rose 24% versus 17%. PwC frames this as a widening two-tier workforce—firms using AI to amplify staff pulling away from those still on the sidelines. But the rosy top-line hides a sharper story underneath, and it lands hardest on the youngest workers. The entry-level squeeze hiding in the data Globally, entry-level roles highly exposed to AI have flatlined. PwC itself plans to cut US entry-level hiring by a third over the next three years, Business Insider reported in August. The roles that survive are being "seniorised"—AI-exposed junior jobs that piled on more than 10 traditionally senior skills grew 35% between 2019 and 2025, while comparable roles without that upgrade fell 10%. So the bar for a first job is rising fast, even as the work itself shifts. Kande knows the talent crunch firsthand. In November he told the BBC that PwC is "looking for hundreds and hundreds of engineers. We just cannot find them." In February, the firm's US arm launched its first dedicated engineering career track—a quiet admission that the AI era needs a different kind of recruit altogether.