A potential boost from AI in ageing societies: Early insights

Christophe André and Matthias Schief

No 1870, OECD Economics Department Working Papers from OECD Publishing

Abstract: Demographic headwinds are set to weaken economic growth in OECD countries over the coming decades. At the same time, artificial intelligence (AI) provides opportunities for productivity gains, potentially alleviating labour shortages and boosting economic growth. However, little is known about how exposure to AI varies over the life cycle and what this may imply for AI deployment in ageing societies. This paper shows, using OECD Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) data, that workers’ overall exposure to AI (automation and augmentation) exhibits an inverted U-shaped pattern across age groups, albeit less pronounced when controlling for education, occupation and country. Exposure to automation is higher in younger age groups and declines rapidly with age, as experience tends to complement AI. Nevertheless, as a general-purpose technology, AI is bound to be disruptive. Reaping its benefits will require labour market reallocation, reskilling and upskilling, and business dynamism and innovation, which may all be weaker in ageing societies.

Keywords: ageing; artificial intelligence; business dynamism; demography; economic growth; innovation; labour market policies; lifelong learning; PIAAC; productivity; reskilling; technological change; upskilling (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J08 J11 J24 O33 O40 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-07-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ain
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1787/be002e40-en (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oec:ecoaaa:1870-en

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in OECD Economics Department Working Papers from OECD Publishing Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().