AI job postings rose several months after falling from their peak in March 2022. This pickup comes from a shift towards AI employment in several sectors, particularly software development.
Key Points:
- AI-related job postings are on the rise, reaching 2% of all jobs at the end of February 2024. However, AI-related posts have yet to take the recent peak of 3.3%, reaching March 2022.
- AI-related job postings are well below recent highs as job postings are falling in sectors that are most likely to list AI jobs including math and software development.
- The recent increase in AI job postings is due not to pick up in job postings in AI-heavy sectors, but to an increase in AI share in job postings, particularly in software development jobs.
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Generating Artificial Intelligence (GENAI), and more widely artificial intelligence (AI) tools, could destroy future work. But today, both technologies are already creating new jobs and have been going on for a while.
It can create text, images and audio, genai attracted global attention when it exploded into the scene in late 2022. The new features of the tool have led to how Job could change, change in the near future, or even be eliminated as the tool improves. At this point, employing lab research suggests that Genai is likely to reinforce a particular role rather than completely replacing it. This has yet to halt significant growth in tool adoption and development. Although there is a very small share of total US employment, since January 2023, Genai-related employment has grown rapidly, up from 100,000 job postings at the end of February 2024 to 11,000, an increase of more than 30 times.
However, companies have hired them over the years, including thinking about machine learning and machine vision, for other AI skills and technology-related roles. However, even if the total level of broad AI employment remains much higher, wider AI employment growth is far less than genai-specific jobs growth. AI-related job openings have been on the rise since last summer, but overall post shares have fallen well below their recent peak.
At the end of February, we actually included AI-related keywords from the recent low of 1.64% in June 2023, but it is well below the 3.3% peak registered in March 2022. Given the predictions and excitement about AI, why are field posts being suppressed?
First, it is clear that the recent wave of enthusiasm around AI is more specifically centered around Genai. But more broadly, the AI labour market is deeply connected to the tech labour market, with posts on technology-related employment currently falling. Consider the two occupational sectors with the highest share of widely related AI-related job postings. Mathematics and software development. As of February 29th, the actual job posting index shows that postings for mathematics has declined by 58% since March 2022, when AI job openings peaked. In the software development sector, pullbacks are more serious, falling 67% over the same period.
So does this mean that recent increases in AI employment could be attributed to an increase in the broader technological labor market? In short, no. Since June 2023, mathematics and software development submissions have fallen by 3.5% and 11% respectively (recent low points for AI-related job openings). The overall increase in AI-related job share since then has been largely due to an increase in the share of employment within certain sectors related to AI. In other words, jobs that are particularly relevant to AI are turning upward despite the continued slides of job listings within the category. The rise in AI-related share of software development jobs has been the biggest contributor to an overall increase in AI-related job share since it bottomed out in June last year. Almost two-quarters of software development jobs (22%) increased from 19% in June 2023 at the end of February. While the overall technological labor market may not recover, our data suggests that employers are beginning to return to AI employment.
The short-term outlook for AI employment is likely to be tied to the entire high-tech market, with a significant increase in AI share required wider rebounds across technology job postings. However, it is clear that tech employers are shifting more towards AI. For job seekers, this trend means leaning into their interest and skills in artificial intelligence if they want to acquire the role of technology. More broadly, the increase in AI-related employment points to deeper corporate investments in these technologies. The potential returns on these investments, and the impact on productivity, can be uncertain, stimulating, and inducing anxiety at once. We will continue to track AI jobs to get a better sense of how this trend progresses.
Methodology
AI sharing of job postings is calculated by extracting job postings that are generally related to AI, using a broader list of keywords that show skills related to AI. Jobs in this category include generative AI job postings.
The analysis involved extracting job information directly related to the generator AI using specific keywords indicating the existence of such as “generated AI,” “large language model,” and “chat GPT.”
