New Frontiers: Employers and the Evolving Workforce

Employers are navigating a dynamic environment filled with opportunities and challenges. The confluence of megatrends, such as artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics, population aging, and labor shortages, are reshaping the future of work. How are employers addressing these new realities? What does it mean for workers? 

New Frontiers: Employers and the Evolving Workforce, a collaboration between Transamerica Institute and Transamerica Center for Retirement Studies, provides insights on how employers are integrating advanced technologies, becoming age-friendly employers, and evaluating and enhancing employee benefit offerings, as they compete for human talent. It provides an in-depth view of employers’ overarching business concerns, state of recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic, encounters with megatrends and how they are impacting their businesses, workforce management priorities, business practices, and health, welfare, and retirement benefit offerings.

Key findings include:

• 72% of employers currently use or plan to use robotics or AI to augment their human workforce.
• 85% of employers feel responsible for helping their employees keep their job skills up to date, yet only 44% cite talent development as a top workforce management priority.
• Among those with available job openings last year, only 26% of employers gave "a great deal" of consideration to age 50-plus job applicants, presenting opportunities to tap into a multigenerational workforce.
• Employers across company size share personal insights into unique human skills that cannot be replaced by AI and robotics such as building trust, fostering inclusion, driving change, and many more.

The report offers analysis by small (less than 100 employees), medium (100 to 499 employees), and large companies (500+ employees). And it outlines recommendations for employers and policymakers.

The report is based on Transamerica Institute’s survey of more than 1,800 for-profit U.S. employers conducted in September and October 2024, and it features comparisons with Transamerica Center for Retirement Studies' survey of more than 5,400 workers of for-profit companies conducted in September and October 2024.