When Evanston, Illinois-based Darren Angle was in talks to join biotech research startup Prism Analytic Technologies in May, “head of AI” wasn’t even a position yet.
“We were trying to come up with a title,” says Angle, a software engineer who previously worked on artificial intelligence at Shopify and now, as the startup’s “head of AI,” builds large language models for pharma companies and scientists. “It was sort of like, ‘let’s figure out what the role is going to be.’”
Now, there are a lot more of those positions, and titles for them are coming into view. According to new data released Tuesday in LinkedIn’s Future of Work report, the share of global English-language job postings on the platform mentioning GPT or ChatGPT has increased 21 times since November 2022, when OpenAI first released its AI chatbot into the world.
“We’re seeing the evolution of jobs now changing faster than it was before,” says LinkedIn chief economist Karin Kimbrough. Newer job titles include chief AI officer, AI engineer, head of AI, AI specialist, AI advisor and AI data scientist. The number of U.S. companies with a head of AI has nearly tripled in the last five years, according to LinkedIn’s report.
Other job sites are also seeing a boom in AI-related jobs. As of August 11, Indeed had 529 listings for generative AI-related jobs per one million postings on the site—its highest yet, up from 104 per million on November 30, 2022.
While hiring has slowed, Indeed economist Cory Stahle says, demand for people with AI skills is still high. “We’ve gone from this really fast boil to a still really warm pot of water here,” he says.
ZipRecruiter saw 1,309 generative AI-related job postings in July—its highest yet—compared to just 21 listings a year prior, the job search engine said.
Whether the jobs AI creates will outweigh the ones it erases won’t be clear for years. LinkedIn’s report follows months of reports predicting how many jobs AI will replace: Goldman Sachs estimates AI could replace 300 million full-time jobs. Employers surveyed by the World Economic Forum in a May report predict AI will eliminate 83 million jobs by 2027, but create 69 million—a net decrease of 14 million jobs.
John Sviokla, cofounder of advisory firm GAI Insights and a long-time AI advisor to companies like PwC, compares the buzz to “when people predicted drivers were going to go away” following the introduction of driverless cars. “That was exactly the wrong answer,” he says.
Other potential job titles predicted to grow: Ethicists and chief trust officers. As companies integrate more AI into their systems, says Sameer Maskey, founder of AI technology and education firm Fusemachines, it will be important for companies to be able to “showcase to their end users that they have done all the things required to make sure the system is not biased.”
The LinkedIn report also found that the platform’s users are rapidly adding AI-oriented skills to their profiles, a likely sign job seekers see AI opportunities increasing. The rate at which LinkedIn users added generative AI-related skills, such as natural language processing, classification or “question answering”—the ability to efficiently respond to questions in a way that best prompts AI models—has nearly doubled. In the seven months leading up to ChatGPT’s launch last November, that rate was 7.7%; in the seven months following it, it increased 13%.
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