We use AI to work faster, not harder. It does the heavy lifting so we don’t have to. It’s our go-to for planning finances, finding recipes, planning travel itineraries, hacking DIY projects, and even troubleshooting personal dilemmas.
But that same AI that is making you more productive is restructuring the economy in ways most people underestimate. It is changing the jobs we do, how long we work, how long we live, and how easy it is to separate us from our savings.
Your earning years are the variable
The income side is what has most people concerned, although probably for the wrong reasons.
There’s no question that AI has already altered the workplace: BCG’s 2026 analysis suggests between 50% and 55% of roles will meaningfully change within three years, with another 10 to 15% likely to disappear within five.
While the technology is displacing roles, it is also generating new ones. The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 projects that by 2030, 92 million roles will be displaced and 170 million new ones will be created. Seizing those new roles will require adaptability and a willingness to retrain.
It can also mean a tougher job market. Goldman Sachs Research has found that workers displaced by technology take roughly a month longer to find new employment and suffer real earnings losses of more than 3% upon re-employment.
Those wage effects persist for up to a decade, with earnings growing nearly 10 percentage points slower than peers who were never displaced. This technological displacement, Goldman warns, is causing delayed homeownership and broader “scarring effects” on the economy.
In the African market, AI deployment is biting hard. A 2025 PwC Africa Workforce Hopes and Fears Survey found that while job postings requiring AI skills are growing 66% faster than others, nearly 49% of current roles across the region could be affected by AI.
Recent local data from Mercer further shows that while only 41% of local employees feel they are thriving, the risk isn’t just jobs disappearing, it’s that skills gaps are widening, triggering redundancies.
Threats we don’t consider
The real threat though is an unexpected early retirement. If your skills don’t adapt, you could find yourself out of the workforce earlier than you’d planned.
Given that National Treasury data, supported by 10X’s own Retirement Reality Report, suggests only 6% of South Africans are on track to retire comfortably under current assumptions, losing years of earning potential would be catastrophic for most households.
Then there’s longevity: AI is already accelerating drug discovery using machine‑learning models to screen and design treatments at a speed that was unthinkable just five years ago. Development timelines for treatments are being significantly curtailed, putting cancer therapies, Alzheimer’s treatments, cardiovascular and metabolic interventions within reach.
On a human level, this is good news. Financially, it is an underappreciated risk. If we’re living, on average, much longer, a retirement fund modelled to last 20 years may need to last 35. This means retirees are more likely to run out of money because they outlived projections.
The fix is uncomfortable but obvious: if your money needs to last 15 years longer, you either save more, work longer, or spend less in retirement. Pushing your retirement date out by three years and lifting contributions by even 2% of salary can close most of the gap. The earlier you run the recalculation, the cheaper it is.
To make your money last longer, you must also defend it from high fees. The real challenge is pinning down that actual total cost. Investment management charges, advice fees, platform fees, performance fees, and admin costs are typically spread across different documents, expressed in different units, or left out entirely.
Most people never check what they’re really paying. In 2015, ASISA introduced the Effective Annual Cost (EAC) standard to force financial institutions to disclose total costs in four comparable buckets. Most providers meet the requirement. Few make the final figure prominent or easy to understand.
Check your fund’s true cost with an EAC calculator. If the number is higher than you thought, remember: reclaiming just one per cent means more money stays invested to compound over decades.
Elderly fraud is another factor many of us don’t consider. CrowdStrike’s 2025 Global Threat Report shows that voice phishing has surged 442%, driven by cloning tools that can now replicate a voice indistinguishably from a short public recording.
These tools, together with AI‑generated video (deepfakes), make it far easier to impersonate trusted voices and faces. Research consistently shows that most people cannot reliably distinguish AI-generated video and audio from genuine recordings.
Older retirees, with decades of accumulated wealth sitting in accessible accounts, are the primary target. The FBI investigating elder fraud tracked $893 million lost to AI-enabled fraud targeting seniors in a single year – the money people spent decades building.
AI as an asset
AI is also the most powerful retirement planning tool any generation has had access to. Robo-advisors have brought the cost of professional-grade wealth management down dramatically. AI-driven planning tools can run thousands of scenario simulations in real time, adjusting for inflation, tax changes, market behaviour and your own spending patterns.
In practice, this means you can sit with an app and ask, ‘What happens if I retire three years later, or increase my contributions by 2%?’ and see the impact in seconds. The kind of modelling that used to require an actuary is now available on your phone. Pension funds are using the same technology to simplify administration and pull costs out of the system, which feeds directly back into member returns.
EY’s 2025 GenAI in Wealth and Asset Management Survey shows 95% of investment management firms are already running at least three GenAI use cases, with nearly all planning to add more within two years.
Ultimately, AI can change your retirement outcomes in three ways: it can put pressure on your earning years, it can stretch your spending years, and threaten your accumulated savings if you’re not careful. But it also gives you sharper tools and better modelling than any generation before.
It’s on us: how we adapt our skills, how we protect our accounts, how we plan for a longer life.
The future will always be uncertain, but your retirement shouldn’t have to be.
By Michael Rossouw, Senior Investment Consultant, 10X Investments
