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- The 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 companies race to adopt AI, they’re placing a higher premium on job candidates who know their way around the technology.
A recent study by labor market research firm Lightcast found that jobs requiring AI-related skills offer higher annual salaries than those without. This is true not only in technology-heavy industries like IT and Computer Science, but also in several other sectors.
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A closer look at the findings
Researchers analyzed billions of job postings over 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 a 28% higher average salary than those that didn’t, a difference of about $18,000 per year. This 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 across the entire job market, not limited to a few specific use cases, and we also show jobs that include AI skills command a salary premium relative to comparable roles that do not,” the authors note in the report.
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Other recent data, however, has shown that recent graduates with computer science degrees are struggling to find work in the tech sector, as AI tools begin to automate many of the routine tasks that have historically been delegated to younger, less experienced workers.
Meanwhile, tech giants have been locked in a relentless battle to acquire 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).
Technology and beyond
New Lightcast data indicates that the competition for AI talent is now spreading beyond technology to a range of other industries. In fact, more than half (51%) of all job postings analyzed in the study that listed AI skills were outside of AI and computer science, up from 44% in 2022 and 39% in 2019.
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AI skills are still in highest demand within IT and computer science roles, according to the LightYear study. But they are also increasingly becoming a hiring priority for employers in a wide range of other industries—especially marketing and public relations, science, and research. The industries least likely to seek AI skills were hospitality/food/tourism, personal services, and transportation, according to the report.
The study also found that AI skills demand varies across industries. Transportation jobs tended to prioritize familiarity with autonomous driving, for example, while maintenance jobs sought robotics experience.
Advice for companies
The bottom line for employers, according to the report, is that success in the AI era depends largely on the ability to understand which AI skills are most relevant 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. “Organizations that master this transition—the educators and HR leaders who can identify which AI skills are most important for their context and deliver targeted training that creates measurable value—will lead their industries and avoid falling behind.”
