AI Optimism: Who’s In and Who’s Out

Optimism surrounding artificial intelligence appears to be surging in Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia, significantly outpacing sentiment in Western Europe and North America. This finding emerges from a comprehensive report by Anthropic, which surveyed approximately 81,000 individuals across 159 countries.

The study, released on Wednesday, highlights that the primary aspiration driving AI adoption for most respondents revolves around achieving economic gains. However, industry analysts caution that the benefits of this technological revolution are unlikely to be distributed equitably.

Anthropic researchers engaged users of its Claude large language model in dialogues designed to explore usage patterns, hopes, and concerns regarding AI’s advancement. These conversations, facilitated by Anthropic Interviewer—a specialized iteration of Claude trained for interview purposes—were then analyzed by Claude itself. The process involved initial filtering to remove unproductive or superficial responses, followed by sentiment classification and tagging.

Respondents consistently identified their workplaces as the primary arena for AI-driven benefits and the realization of their highest hopes for the technology. Specifically, 18.8% of participants cited “professional excellence” as their main objective for employing AI, while a substantial 32% reported that AI was most instrumental in boosting their productivity.

According to Anthropic, the observed productivity gains largely stemmed from users delegating routine or mundane tasks to AI, thereby freeing themselves to “focus on strategic, higher-level problems.” Others indicated that AI enabled them to allocate more time to personal pursuits outside of their professional responsibilities.

“At the moment, AI is best suited to highly repetitive, narrowly focused, goal-oriented use cases… similar to specific tasks on an assembly line,” notes Lian Jye Su, chief analyst at Omdia, in an email. This view suggests that current AI capabilities are optimized for well-defined, repetitive functions.

More granularly, these applications frequently encompass administrative functions such as “HR, billing, and other backoffice functions,” according to Seema Shah, vice president of insights at market intelligence firm Sensor Tower. These are often the areas ripe for automation and efficiency gains.

The economic dividends of AI also appear to disproportionately benefit an entrepreneurial segment. Anthropic’s findings indicate that independent workers—a category including entrepreneurs, small business owners, and those with side projects—experienced more than triple the rate of economic empowerment from AI utilization compared to salaried employees. This suggests a significant advantage for those operating with greater autonomy.

However, recent technological advancements underscore that even ostensibly higher-order professional roles are not immune to AI-driven disruption. The launch of Anthropic’s Cowork, a Claude variant capable of sophisticated tasks like financial modeling and data management, triggered a broad sell-off in the stocks of software and research firms in February. Investors reacted with apprehension to the implications of AI models undertaking complex analytical work.

As tech giants like Anthropic and Alibaba channel billions into developing agentic AI—models capable of autonomous action with minimal human oversight—the potential for profound disruption to professional lives is escalating. “These agents are going to do increasingly sophisticated tasks on behalf of people, and that is going to have massive impacts,” stated Marc Einstein, research director at Counterpoint Research, in a recent discussion. This points to a future where AI agents function as sophisticated digital proxies.

The pervasive uncertainty surrounding future AI developments and their transformative impact on human labor has brought job displacement concerns to the forefront. Anthropic’s study revealed that 22.3% of respondents identified job security as their primary source of worry, a sentiment that appears to be widely distributed across various job sectors.

A poignant observation from a U.S.-based software engineer, quoted anonymously in the Anthropic report, illustrates this anxiety: “When I am coding now, I am mostly just an observer, not a creator anymore. I can see that even for the observer role, I might not be needed.” This sentiment reflects a growing apprehension about the evolving nature of highly skilled work in the age of AI.

Amidst the rapid evolution of AI, analysts remain divided on who will ultimately reap the most significant economic benefits. “I see AI as the great equalizer,” argues Einstein. “One of the beautiful things about AI is that in rural Indonesia or Brazil, [people] have access to the same AI as [in] the U.S. or Japan.” This perspective champions AI as a democratizing force, offering universal access to advanced tools.

Intriguingly, users of Claude from emerging economies, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America, reported 10-12% lower rates of negative sentiment towards AI when contrasted with users from Western Europe and North America. Furthermore, respondents from Sub-Saharan Africa expressed greater entrepreneurial ambitions and a stronger desire for financial independence through AI compared to their North American counterparts. Similar trends were observed when comparing North American users with those in Latin America and Asia.

While these perceptions may accurately reflect the current sense of opportunity and potential for economic mobility offered by AI, particularly in regions with less developed traditional infrastructure, a critical examination of the study’s methodology is warranted, according to Lia Raquel Neves, founder of ethical consultancy EITIC. “The pool of respondents ‘[skewed] toward people who have found enough value in AI to keep using it, and likely toward more positive visions than a general population sample would produce,'” Anthropic acknowledges in its appendix, highlighting a significant selection bias. Nearly half of all participants were also based in North America and Western Europe.

“The results should be interpreted as an indicator of how early and active users, in different contexts, are framing their experience[s] with AI, and not as a consolidated picture,” Raquel Neves elaborated. This underscores the need to view the findings not as a definitive societal portrait but as a snapshot of early adopters’ perspectives.

While users in emerging economies appear most enthusiastic about the economic prospects AI offers, the equitable distribution of AI’s developmental rewards remains a significant question. A 2025 report by the United Nations Development Programme cautioned that future AI advancements could exacerbate existing socioeconomic disparities. The report noted that economic benefits tend to be disproportionately captured by nations possessing greater digital infrastructure and capacity, typically wealthier countries. “In the absence of adequate conditions, [AI] may amplify existing vulnerabilities, namely through digital exclusion, algorithmic biases or dependence on external systems,” Raquel Neves warned.

Although definitively identifying those who stand to lose the most in the AI revolution is premature, the trajectory of AI development points towards significant winners. “Whoever successfully brings the [AI] agents that we’re all going to start using, is absolutely going to win,” predicts Einstein, emphasizing the pivotal role of pioneering AI agent developers in shaping the future economic landscape.

Anthropic did not respond to requests for comment.

— CNBC’s Dylan Butts contributed to this report.