Artificial Intelligence is rapidly reshaping the labor market, and the predictions about who will win and who will lose are all over the map. One clue may come from an unlikely place — men’s professional tennis. Its own technological upheaval in the 1970s is a rare natural experiment in how technological change reshuffles which skills matter, who comes out ahead and how long the transition takes.
How new tennis rackets changed the game
Once upon a time, tennis was played with wood rackets. This racket technology, the best at the time, dictated much of the style, technique and strategy players used. Then in the late 1970s, the sudden arrival of composite rackets transformed the game.
At first, the new rackets helped everyone play better, and within just a few years they had taken over completely. But, it quickly became clear that these new rackets weren’t just “wood rackets, but better.” They afforded new opportunities for spin and power that weren’t possible before.
Young players who grew up with these rackets developed their games to capitalize on the greater potential for spin and power. Established players who had designed their games around the old racket technology soon began to struggle against them. The competitive landscape reordered quickly: previously dominant players fell in the rankings, older players exited at higher rates and younger players gained an advantage — patterns we document in our peer-reviewed research.
The biggest winners were the first cohort to truly grow up with the new rackets — those who were young children when the rackets arrived. It’s telling that the youngest-ever winners of each of the four Grand Slam tournaments all claimed their titles between 1983 and 1990. In the end, the composite racket transformed men’s tennis from a game of control and finesse to a much more physical and fast-paced game characterized by power, spin and speed.
How this applies to the development of AI
Just as with composite tennis rackets, AI will not uniformly raise the returns to all skills or favor “more-skilled” workers in a general sense. Rather, it will change which skills are valuable.
Skills such as manual data analysis, unaided writing and traditional programming may not be as valuable going forward, while new skills like prompt engineering or AI-assisted coding will become increasingly valuable. What’s more, preexisting skills, such as manual dexterity and spatial reasoning, may become more valuable as well.
Just as with composite rackets, the largest benefits will accrue not to experienced professionals who attempt to shoehorn AI into their existing skill set but to the first cohort of workers who grow up with it natively.
These individuals can integrate AI fluently into their habits and skills from the outset. They will make their skill investments in full awareness of the new technological landscape. The oldest workers who are nearing retirement may also benefit. They will reap the benefits of increased productivity but will be out of the labor force before the next generation arrives.
Middle-aged workers, by contrast, have developed a skill set optimized for the pre-AI world. Their expertise is often in tasks now partially automated or reshaped by AI. They may adopt AI tools, but they have lost much of their advantage relative to younger workers. As with tennis, we can expect a temporary surge of younger workers outperforming their more seasoned peers.
AI will not impact everyone equally
AI’s strength lies in its ability to use and manipulate language, whether in computer code or human language. This is likely to affect white-collar workers, especially those engaged in less creative work. If your day is spent updating spreadsheets, answering emails and writing a weekly memo summarizing your work, then AI is coming for you. In contrast, manual workers may see their wages rise.
It’s not implausible to imagine AI becoming a complement for blue-collar workers like electricians, plumbers and mechanics, even as it substitutes for much of today’s white-collar work. Just as the 20th century witnessed the development of automation and computers that substituted for blue-collar work and complemented white-collar work, the rise of AI in the 21st century may reverse that trend and shift the advantage back toward blue-collar workers.
In men’s professional tennis, the transition to composite rackets took nearly 25 years to fully play out — roughly four generations of players. If AI follows a similar path, its ripple effects through the labor market will continue for decades. Workplaces, educational systems and cultural norms will be transformed in unpredictable ways.
The workplace of tomorrow will look as unfamiliar to us as modern professional tennis did to tennis fans during the wooden-racket era. Like the composite racket, AI won’t simply raise productivity — it will redefine the game and reward those who train for the new style of play.