4-Quarter Lives Anu Madgavkar: Demographics Meets AI
In this week’s 4-Quarter Lives Podcast, Avivah Wittenberg-Cox is joined by Anu Madgavkar, a senior partner at McKinsey & Company, to explore the collision of two defining forces shaping our future: global demographic decline and the rapid rise of artificial intelligence.
Anu has led two major McKinsey reports published in the same year, one on depopulation and shifting dependency ratios, and the other on AI, agents, robots and the future of work. In this conversation, she explains why these forces cannot be understood in isolation. Falling birth rates and longer lives are shrinking the global labour supply at the same moment that AI is expanding productive capacity.
Together, Avivah and Anu unpack the scale of the demographic shift already underway. Two thirds of the world now live in countries below replacement fertility. In many advanced economies, the ratio of working-age adults to people over 65 will fall from four to two by 2050. Without changes to how we work and how long we work, this alone could remove around 0.5 percentage points of annual GDP growth.
AI enters the picture as a potential counterweight. Anu shares McKinsey research showing that 57 percent of current work hours in the US could technically be automated with existing technologies. By 2030, around 30 percent of work hours may be repurposed. This does not point to mass unemployment, but to a deep redesign of jobs, workflows, and skills.
A central theme is AI fluency. Demand for it has risen sevenfold in just two years, faster than any other skill. Anu argues this is not a young person’s advantage. Mid-career and older professionals often bring deep system knowledge, judgement, and pattern recognition that matter even more as work shifts from task execution to oversight, sense-checking, and redesigning processes that include AI co-workers.
Anu also highlights eight high-prevalence transferable skills that appear in 70 to 90 percent of job postings. These include communication, problem solving, detail orientation, writing, operations thinking, and customer awareness. In a world of constant job change, these form the backbone of sustainable 60-year careers, especially when combined with hands-on experience using AI tools.
The conversation closes with a clear message for midlife professionals. Experiment, use AI directly learn by doing. The future of work will reward those who pair human judgement, experience, and empathy with new technological partners.
Anu Madgavkar is a senior partner at McKinsey & Company and a leader at the McKinsey Global Institute, where she focuses on the future of work, productivity, demographics, and technology. She has co-authored major global research on depopulation, ageing societies, AI, automation, and workforce transitions. Anu advises business leaders and policymakers worldwide on how economic and technological shifts affect jobs, skills, and growth. She is widely recognised for translating complex data into practical insights on how work and society are changing.
Useful Links:
* McKinsey Global Institute. Depopulation and Dependency Reporthttps://www.mckinsey.com/mgi/our-research/dependency-and-depopulation-confronting-the-consequences-of-a-new-demographic-reality
* McKinsey Global Institute. AI, Agents, Robots, and the Future of Workhttps://www.mckinsey.com/mgi/our-research/generative-ai-and-the-future-of-work-in-america
* Anu Madgavkar on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anu-madgavkar/
* McKinsey & Company Website: https://www.mckinsey.com
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