Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Human Work: Global Governance, Workforce Transformation, and Strategic Pathways for Industry 5.0

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) can now draft text, write code and summarise documents at a level that was out of reach five years ago. These are tasks performed by clerks, analysts, programmers and other office workers, a group that earlier automation waves mostly left alone. This paper asks what the available evidence says about the effect of AI on employment and productivity, how current governance instruments deal with workers, and what a transition consistent with the European idea of Industry 5.0 would require. The study combines an integrative review of 62 academic and institutional sources with a document analysis of AI governance instruments issued between 2016 and 2026. Exposure studies now largely agree that AI changes tasks inside jobs more often than it removes whole jobs. The International Labour Organization places about 24% of global employment in occupations with some exposure to generative AI, but only 3.3% in the highest exposure group, and women in high-income countries are almost three times as likely as men to hold such jobs. Controlled experiments report productivity gains of 14% to 56% on specific tasks, mostly for less experienced workers, while Danish register data show close to zero effect on earnings and hours so far. On the governance side, the EU AI Act is the only major regime that treats workplace AI as high risk, and even its deadlines were pushed back in 2026. Labour transition policy sits outside most AI rules. Based on these findings, the paper proposes a four-layer Human-Centric AI Work Transition (HAWT) framework and sets out stakeholder actions and five testable propositions, with attention to developing economies such as Bangladesh.