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Companies are increasingly asking their potential technology hires: Do you know how to work with AI?
Nearly 1 in 4 U.S. tech jobs posted so far this year are seeking employees with artificial-intelligence skills, job-listings data show, as firms in nearly every corner of the economy adjust their recruiting pipelines to embrace the technology.
In the information sector, which includes many of the tech giants investing heavily in AI development and deployment, a leading 36% of IT jobs posted in January were AI-related. Companies in finance and professional-services industries, such as banks and consulting firms, also are looking for technology staff who know how to use or build AI algorithms and models.
It isn’t just high-tech firms that are making AI a priority.
The debut of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in late 2022 was a turning point for the AI job market, said Anil K. Gupta, a professor at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business and co-lead of its artificial-intelligence job tracker.
AI-related jobs existed before then, he said, but the chatbot opened eyes about the power of integrating AI into products and workflows, leading to a “diffusion” across sectors even as many companies were pulling back from a pandemic-era hiring binge.
The university’s data show that a large retail company, for example, posted for a data science director who could use predictive algorithms to improve store layouts; a utilities provider looked for an analyst to assess wildfire risk with machine-learning methods; and a drugmaker sought out a programmer for its computational chemistry group.
In industries that make up a smaller share of the tech-hiring landscape, open IT roles are increasingly AI-focused. Only a fraction of healthcare job postings, for example, are tech jobs, but the share of new tech openings in January that were AI-related was nearly double that of a few years ago.
Companies are mostly “looking for people that have experience or knowledge integrating AI into jobs that already exist,” and not hiring for completely new AI-focused roles, said Thomas Vick, senior regional director at staffing firm Robert Half. A firm might want a cybersecurity engineer who can use AI to more accurately and efficiently evaluate potential threats, he said.
AI-related listings represent a fraction of the overall market, making up 1.3% of all job postings in January, according to the Maryland tracker, which is published in partnership with job-data firm LinkUp and consulting firm Outrigger Group. Tech job listings, which cover a broad group of computer- and math-related occupations, were 5.4% of all openings.
New AI-related postings rose 68% from the time ChatGPT was released in the final quarter of 2022 through the end of last year, while tech postings were down 27% over that same period.
Engineers without AI skills can still fare well in the job market, said Andy Challenger, senior vice president at Challenger, Gray & Christmas. The outplacement firm works with companies who are letting go of workers to help them find new jobs, and sees engineers land more quickly than the average worker.
AI skills tend to fetch premium pay, though, and might also bring job security.
“I’m not seeing a lot of people with cutting-edge AI skills come through our programs right now, which means that companies are hanging onto them,” Challenger said.
Write to Nate Rattner at nate.rattner@wsj.com