- Demand for AI skills is expected to grow in 2025, driven by tech and non-tech firms.
- Tech industry hiring could rebound after several slow years, driven by demand for AI skills.
- AI skills are often scarce, with high vacancy rates for roles like natural language processing.
People and companies are placing big bets on artificial intelligence. One of the safer ones is that demand for workers with AI skills will continue to grow.
Labor market watchers told Business Insider that in 2025, as in 2024, many employers will likely be eager to hire people with skills in AI — like machine-learning specialists who train models, one of this year's most-talked-about roles — but also in wider areas that touch the technology.
In the tech industry, which has experienced years of lackluster hiring following a pandemic-era surge, there are early signs of a rebound, Hannah Calhoon, VP of AI at Indeed, told BI.
If that continues, she said, hiring will likely include roles involving AI.
Another area of demand, Calhoon said, could come from employers that aren't tech firms yet that need people skilled in incorporating off-the-shelf AI tools into their businesses and datasets.
However, unlike the tech giants, these employers aren't likely to try to build their own AI platforms, she said. So, rather than trying to recruit data scientists and those machine-learning engineers, these companies might instead want workers who can help decide which AI instruments to use and how to incorporate them into their workflow.
"What they're going to be looking for is people who understand those systems and can help them implement those tools in their business," Calhoon said.
That's likely to translate to increased demand in 2025 for roles involving AI implementation and transformation — jobs like applications administrators or solutions architects, she said.
There are other signs that the demand for talent involving AI is picking up.
Last week, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said that the company is experiencing "a big hiring surge" and working to fill thousands of roles to help sell products, including those involving AI. Benioff said the company has 9,000 referrals for the 2,000 positions it's opened.
Masayoshi Son, the CEO of SoftBank, likewise recently talked up AI's potential. At an event with President-elect Donald Trump last week, Son said that the Japanese conglomerate would invest $100 billion into the US over the next four years and create at least 100,000 jobs in AI and related areas.
Already, other employers are looking to grow around AI. According to Indeed, job postings mentioning AI that saw the biggest growth in the first 11 months of 2024 were senior scientists, software engineering managers, research engineers, and researchers.
AI know-how is scarce for some roles
The market may be growing, though it can be hard for employers to hire in some AI-related areas. The talent firm Randstad reports that it's twice as difficult to find and hire senior-level workers skilled in AI and automation as it is for other senior-level jobs in different industries.
Vacancy rates for roles involving specialized AI skills, like developing natural-language processing models, are as high as 15%, Randstad found. That's about double the overall job vacancy rate in the US. Randstad's estimate on AI jobs is based on an assessment of some 10 million job postings and 136 million résumés in the third quarter of 2024.
According to Randstad, employers worldwide are having the hardest time finding workers skilled in natural language processing, predictive modeling, and "stakeholder communication." The firm notes that this is partly because such abilities are specialized yet also in demand across industries.
In the US, Randstad said, the vacancy rate for jobs that require skills like natural language processing stands at 14%.
Starting from a small base
Indeed recently reported that, as of September, the share of US job postings that mention generative AI or related terminology was up 3.5 times year over year.
Yet that doesn't mean that all employers are looking for GenAI whizzes. Indeed found that only 2% of employers globally included skills related to AI in their job descriptions. By comparison, more than 20% called for basic computer skills.
Nevertheless, Calhoon said, employers' demands for AI skills are only likely to grow.
"Maybe not next year, but three or four years from now, in many roles, there will be an expectation that people will have basic fluency in being able to use some of these platforms," she said.
That's likely in part because it's not only major employers that will expect workers to have AI skills.
Andy Schachtel, CEO of Sourcefit, an offshore staffing firm, told BI that businesses of all sizes are looking to AI to boost efficiency.
The US Chamber of Commerce found in a mid-2024 survey of 1,100 small businesses that four in 10 reported using generative AI, up from 23% in 2023. About three-quarters of small businesses surveyed said they plan to adopt emerging tech like AI.
That could add to the already surging demand for leaders who are experts in AI. According to a review of more than 35,000 public and private companies in the US by Altrata, a research firm focused on executive data, the number of people in the role of chief AI officer or its equivalent — a job many people may not have heard of until this year — was up 70% year-over-year through late October.
That demand is likely one reason that workers with AI skills or who possess capabilities working with AI tools are, on average, 34% more likely to change jobs, according to Randstad.
Nicole Kyle, who researches the future of work, told BI that even for parts of a business where AI might be expected to take on a good share of the workload — like call centers —its adoption would likely increase demand for other roles.
She said that in the case of call centers, for example, those added roles might include positions involving data governance and data cleaning, as well as customer experience. That's one reason Kyle, who's cofounder of CMP Research, said she remains optimistic about AI's impact on jobs.
"I do think net-net, it will create jobs the way other technological advancements have," Kyle said.