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ZDNET’s key takeaways
- Demand for AI skills is on the rise across industries.
- A single AI skill makes a huge difference in listed salaries.
- Different industries are looking for different AI skills.
As businesses race to adopt AI, they’re placing a higher premium on job candidates who know their way around the technology.
A recent study from labor market research firm Lightcast found that jobs requiring AI-related skills offer higher annual salaries than those that don’t. This is true not only in tech-heavy industries like IT and computer science but also across a range of other sectors.
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A closer look at the findings
The researchers analyzed billions of job postings from the past 13 years, and identified 300 AI skills, including AI ethics, governance and regulation, natural language processing, and robotics.
According to the report, job postings that listed just one AI-related skill offered an average salary that was 28% higher than those that didn’t, a difference of around $18,000 per year. That figure jumped to 43% for postings that listed two or more AI skills compared to those that listed none.
“Using real-world job postings, we establish how demand for AI is growing throughout the labor market broadly, not limited to a few specific use cases, and we also show jobs that include AI skills demand a salary premium over comparable roles that do not,” the authors note in the report.
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Other recent data, however, has shown that recent college graduates with computer science degrees have been struggling to find work in the tech sector, as AI tools start to automate many of the routine tasks that historically have been delegated to younger workers with less experience.
Meanwhile, tech giants have been locked in a ruthless battle for acquiring AI talent, driven by a widely held belief that the future of their industry will be dominated by the first company to successfully build artificial general intelligence (or “superintelligence,” in Meta’s case).
Tech and beyond
The new Lightcast data indicates that the contest for AI talent is now spilling beyond tech into a raft of other industries. In fact, more than half (51%) of all job postings analyzed in the study that listed AI skills were outside IT and computer science, up from 44% in 2022 and 39% in 2019.
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AI skills are still in the highest demand within IT and computer science roles, according to the Lightyear study. But they’re also increasingly becoming a hiring priority for employers across a wide range of other industries — especially marketing and PR, and science and research. The industries least likely to be looking for AI skills were hospitality/food/tourism, personal services, and transportation, according to the report.
The study also found that the AI skills employers are seeking vary between industries. Transportation jobs tended to prioritize familiarity with autonomous driving, for example, while maintenance jobs sought robotics experience.
Advice to businesses
The upshot for employers, according to the report, is that success in the AI era will hinge largely on an ability to understand which AI skills are most pertinent to their industry, and factor that information into their hiring and employee training processes.
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“The solution requires precision, not philosophy,” the authors write. “The organizations that master this transition — the educators and HR leaders that can identify which AI skills matter most for their context and deliver targeted training that creates measurable value — will lead their industries and avoid falling behind.”