Job listings looking for people with AI skills are rising fast

AI gets a lot of attention for eliminating human jobs, but more and more it is also creating them.

The number of job postings that mention artificial intelligence has climbed in recent years, a recent report from the Brookings Institution shows, as employers seek out AI-capable workers to assist them in AI adoption and development.

In the last year alone, AI-themed job postings increased by over 100%, the Washington, D.C.-based think tank found. For its report, Brookings analyzed data from Lightcast, a labor market analytics company. AI-related job postings have grown at an average annual rate of nearly 29% over the last 15 years — outstripping the 11% rate of postings in the general economy, the report showed.

Demand for AI expertise is growing as more companies are starting to integrate AI into their workflows. The share of companies using AI in the manufacturing of goods or services has more than doubled from 4% in early 2023 to roughly 9% by mid-2025, according to the report, citing data from the U.S. Census Bureau's Business Trends and Outlook Survey (BTOS).

Still, while AI job growth has accelerated in recent years, it makes up only a small fraction of the labor market overall. Goldman Sachs estimates the peak pace of adoption will hit in the early 2030s, according to its AI Adoption Tracker.

"AI is definitely visible in the micro labor market data, but it doesn't look like it's driving the overall labor market dynamic," said Joseph Briggs, a senior global economist at Goldman Sachs.

The burgeoning AI job market involves a mix of skill sets ranging from advanced AI-specific roles, such as AI engineers, to more general AI-related positions such as software developers, according to Elena Magrini, the global head of research at Lightcast. In 2025, more than 80,000 job postings mentioned generative AI skills, according to the Brookings report, up from 3,780 in 2010.

Cory Stahle, an economist at the Indeed Hiring Lab, said in an email to CBS MoneyWatch that the use of AI by more businesses is spurring demand for consulting jobs, which are intended to help businesses integrate AI into their workflow. Job postings relating to so-called responsible AI jobs, which focus on the ethical use of AI tools in business and society, are also on the rise, according to Indeed.

"In other words, the definition of what it means to be an 'AI job' is changing every day as businesses find new and creative ways to incorporate the technology responsibly," Stahle said.

AI positions may prove an especially appealing sector of the U.S. labor market given that they tend to be associated with higher salaries. Job postings that mention AI skills pay on average 28%, or $18,000, more per year than job postings for similar roles that don't require AI skills, according to a separate report from Lightcast.

Unsurprisingly, AI job growth tends to be concentrated in the tech hubs like Silicon Valley. The renown San Francisco area accounts for 13% of all AI-related job postings, while Seattle accounts for 7% according to data from Lightcast.

That being said, AI jobs are starting to diffuse into other parts of the country including the Sunbelt, a wide swath of land that stretches from the Southeast and Southwest, and along the east coast between Boston and Washington, D.C. said Mark Muro, a senior fellow at Brookings Metro. Universities have also been a catalyst for AI job growth, Muro added, given their role in developing talent bases and training students in computer science.

Magrini noted that AI skills are increasingly required in other non-tech fields like marketing, human resources and finance. Over half of job postings requesting AI skills in 2024 were outside IT and computer science, according to Lightcast data. As for the people landing these jobs, they tend work for tech giants like Amazon, Meta, Apple and Google as well as AI companies such as OpenAI, according to Magrini.

While uptake is uneven across geographic areas, Muro said he expects AI adoption by firms to increase more rapidly in the coming years, as the practical use of the technology becomes more obvious to businesses.

"There does seem to be good consensus that this is very important for productivity and that it does really energize regional leaders and business people," he said.