Even as global unemployment hits historic lows, a sweeping new study of the global workforce by one of the definitive workforce data sources finds that “anxiety”—not confidence—defines how most workers feel about their job, their future, and AI transforming both.

Recommended Video

The numbers don’t lie, and they don’t comfort. Only 22% of workers worldwide strongly agreed that their job was safe from elimination, according to a new report from ADP Research released Wednesday. The finding comes from one of the largest workforce sentiment surveys ever conducted—more than 39,000 workers across 36 countries—and lands with the force of a gut punch: The world’s workers are consumed by fear.

“Despite three years of historically low global unemployment and steady economic growth, our data reveals widespread job insecurity expressed by workers worldwide,” said Nela Richardson, chief economist at ADP.

The culprit is hiding in plain sight: artificial intelligence. As generative AI tools race into the workplace at breakneck speed, workers from Tokyo to Topeka are struggling to process what it means for their livelihoods—and they’re not reassured by what they see. “AI is not like the weather. It is not just going to descend upon us,” Richardson told reporters in a briefing on the survey results in New York City. “It really is hitting us at the task level—by augmenting and making certain tasks more high value.”

A world of anxious workers

The ADP Research Today at Work 2026 report, based on survey responses collected in late summer 2025, paints a portrait of a global workforce caught in the crosscurrents of technological disruption, demographic upheaval, and deep uncertainty. The anxiety cuts across borders and industries, but ADP found that it hits hardest at the bottom of the organizational ladder.

Among individual contributors—the frontline workers who make up the bulk of most companies’ headcount—only 18% felt their job was safe. Frontline managers fared only slightly better at 21%. Confidence rose predictably with seniority: Middle managers came in at 23%, upper managers at 31%, and C-suite executives at 35%. In other words, the higher your perch in the org chart, the less afraid you are of falling. But even then, only barely more than a third of top executives feel like they have job security, according to the results.

The geographic divides are equally stark. In Japan—a country long defined by lifetime employment culture—only 5% of workers felt their jobs were secure, the lowest reading of any market in the survey. Nigeria, by contrast, registered the most confident workforce, with 38% of workers expressing job security, driven largely by a young, tech-savvy population and booming AI adoption. In the United States, the figure was 28%.

AI is making it worse—and better, sort of

The paradox at the heart of the report is this: AI use is correlated with higher engagement and less stress, yet it’s also making workers feel dramatically less productive. Daily AI users were four times as likely as nonusers to say they weren’t as productive as they could be.

The explanation, researchers suggest, is psychological. AI has taken over the small, checklist-style tasks that gave workers a sense of daily accomplishment—answering emails, summarizing documents, generating first drafts. Without those quick wins, people feel as if they’ve done less, even when they’ve arguably done more. “AI does the things that we used to say make us feel productive,” Richardson explained to reporters. “It writes our emails for us. It responds. It summarizes documents for us. And so we have to kind of remeasure productivity in a different way; it’s shifting from productivity based on volume of work to value [of work].”

The flip side: 30% of daily AI users were fully engaged at work, versus just 14% of those who never use AI. Heavy AI users were also significantly less likely to experience negative stress: 11% reported feeling overloaded, compared with 23% of nonusers. The data suggests AI may be a powerful tool for worker well-being, if companies can figure out how to deploy it without triggering dread.

The creeping, unpaid extension of the workday isn’t helping with this angst over productivity: 62% of global workers said they put in up to five hours of unpaid work per week, while 38% reported working off the clock for six hours or more; 12%—disproportionately executives and upper managers—said they work without pay for 16 hours or more weekly.

The data reveals a troubling paradox: Workers logging the most unpaid hours are simultaneously the most engaged and the most likely to be looking for another job. They’re dedicated enough to give their time for free, yet burned out enough to be quietly interviewing elsewhere. “Free work comes at a cost,” the report concludes. “People who put in unpaid hours are more likely to feel unproductive and stressed. They’re also more likely to quit.”

“AI is entering a workforce that is anxious,”

Workers around the world are scared. A massive new survey shows just how much