Workers from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, and with lower educational attainment, are receiving fewer opportunities to access genAI and upskill on the technology than their peers, new Accenture research reveal.

The data, based on a poll of over 1,000 executives and nearly 4,000 employees in the UK, found that just 35% of workers from lower socioeconomic backgrounds have access to gen AI tools, compared to 45% of their peers from more affluent backgrounds.

Additionally, even when workers from a lower socioeconomic background did have equal access to the tools, they reported they still used them less frequently.

The research also highlighted disparities between training when looking at workers with different qualifications, with around a third of workers (29%) with low educational attainment having not received any digital training in the past 24 months, relative to more than half (52%) of higher-education employees who have received such training at least every six months.

This is also reflected when examining the appetite for learning new digital skills at work. Just 6% of those with low educational attainment plan to gain new skills around using AI in the next 12 months, with that figure nearly six times higher among their high-education peers (29%).

Currently, 8.5 million adults in the UK still lack basic digital skills, putting them at risk of missing out on the educational, social and economic changes brought on by AI.

Daljish Channa, Accenture’s corporate citizenship lead in the UK, said: “Gen AI poses a unique opportunity to improve people’s access to technology and new skills.

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“As the technology is accessible through natural language, and being rolled out at pace across workforces, we are seeing people already benefiting directly from its output.

“However, there looks to be unbalanced access to the technology, and training to utilise it properly, which could end up widening the digital divide rather than closing it.

“To combat this, schools, governments, and businesses must seize the moment to work together to ensure everyone has fundamental digital skills, as well as the confidence in using new and established technologies across the board.”