Here’s what the World had to say about the AI economy
A new global survey conducted by Windfall Trust and the Collective Intelligence Project seeks to kickstart the conversations around how we can all ensure the benefits of the predicted “AI boom” reach the people who need it most.
The survey, conducted across 60 countries and with more than 1,023 participants, is among the most geographically wide-ranging public consultations on AI's economic consequences to date. It covers the future of work, wealth distribution and community needs on a truly global scale.
Methodology
This survey serves as a structured global dialogue — not a nationally representative opinion poll. The distinction matters. The survey is one of the first to combine deliberative, interactive methods with global scale–gathering structured public input across a wide range of countries and contexts using a format that allows participants not only to contribute their own views but also to engage with and vote on the ideas of others. — It asked people across a wide range of countries and contexts to reason through a set of genuinely complex questions about AI, wealth, and governance. It did not aim for statistical precision at a country level, but rather to allow us to form an overview of regional patterns and opinions that can help inform future policy conversations.
The survey was conducted in seven languages across 64 countries, with participants recruited through Prolific, a paid research panel platform, ensuring inclusion of people across a range of income levels and contexts including those who do not use AI tools. The interactive format combined standard poll questions, open-ended prompts, and peer voting on each other’s statements.
When we describe findings as reflecting "global" views, we mean that patterns were consistent across regions, income groups, and cultural contexts.
We are confident that the patterns in this data — the preference for jobs over direct cash transfers, the two-stage governance instinct, and the view that AI’s gains represent a shared inheritance — are robust enough to be taken seriously as signals of public values across diverse global contexts. The consistency across regions and income groups, across independently worded questions, gives us reasonable confidence that these are not artefacts of question design. Because Global Dialogues participants deliberate before they respond, their answers reflect considered preferences rather than in-the-moment constructions, the primary condition under which anchoring effects take hold.
We would recommend using it as what it is: a genuinely global, genuinely participatory first look at how people across very different contexts reason about one of the most consequential policy questions of our time, rather than using this data to make claims about the views of any specific national population. It should not be used to make claims about the views of any specific national population. Unlike surveys of existing AI platform users, this sample was drawn from general population panels.
Full methodology, including sample breakdown by country and region, demographic profile, question wording, and technical details of our software and platforms, is available in the technical appendix of the full report. Researchers and journalists wishing to access the underlying data ahead of publication should contact mei@windfalltrust.org/ anna@windfalltrust.org