Economist Richard Baldwin said “AI won’t take your job, it’s somebody using AI that will take your job” at the World Economic Forum’s Growth Summit in May 2023. Labor market data published in 2024 and 2025 measures this shift in hiring preferences, wages and productivity.
Jobs Created vs. Jobs Displaced
The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 surveyed more than 1,000 employers across 22 industry clusters and 55 economies. Together these employers have over 14 million workers. The report’s projections for 2025–2030:
- New jobs created: 170 million
- Jobs displaced: 92 million
- Net gain: 78 million jobs
- Core skills expected to change: 39%
- Employers planning to prioritize upskilling: 85%
- Employers expecting to reduce staff where AI can automate tasks: 40%
The report ranks AI and big data as the fastest-growing skill. By percentage growth, the fastest-growing roles are big data specialists, fintech engineers, and AI and machine learning specialists.
The AI Skills Wage Premium
PwC’s 2025 Global AI Jobs Barometer analyzed nearly one billion job ads and thousands of company financial reports from six continents. Its key findings:
- Jobs requiring AI skills paid an average wage premium of 56% in 2024, up from 25% the previous year.
- Productivity growth in the most AI-exposed industries rose from 7% (2018–2022) to 27% (2018–2024).
- Revenue per employee grew 27% in the most AI-exposed industries, compared with 9% in the least exposed.
- Skills sought by employers changed 66% faster in the most AI-exposed occupations.
- The share of AI-augmented jobs requiring a university degree fell from 66% in 2019 to 59% in 2024.
What Hiring Managers Report
Microsoft and LinkedIn surveyed 31,000 people in 31 countries for the 2024 Work Trend Index. Results related to hiring:
- 75% of knowledge workers use AI at work.
- 66% of leaders would not hire a candidate without AI skills.
- 71% of leaders would hire a less experienced candidate with AI skills over a more experienced candidate without them.
- 78% of AI users bring their own AI tools to work.
- Only 39% of AI users have received AI training from their employer.
- LinkedIn recorded a 142-fold increase in members adding AI skills such as ChatGPT and Copilot to their profiles.
- AI “power users” save more than 30 minutes per day compared with AI skeptics.
Measured Productivity Differences
Controlled studies measure the performance gap between workers with and without AI tools:
- Harvard Business School and Boston Consulting Group, 2023: 758 BCG consultants were tested on 18 realistic tasks. Consultants using GPT-4 completed 12.2% more tasks and worked 25.1% faster. Their results were rated more than 40% higher in quality. Below-average performers improved by 43%, and above-average performers improved by 17%.
- Stanford and MIT, 2023: A study of 5,179 customer support agents gave some of them a generative AI assistant. Access to the assistant raised the number of issues resolved per hour by 14% on average. Novice and lower-skilled agents improved by 34%.
In both studies, the largest gains went to less experienced or lower-performing workers, which narrowed their output gap with senior colleagues.
Where AI Skills Change Daily Work: Search and Marketing
AI has changed how search results are delivered and measured. In March 2025, the Pew Research Center analyzed 68,879 Google searches by 900 U.S. adults and found the following:
- AI summaries appeared in 18% of searches.
- Users clicked a traditional result in 8% of visits with an AI summary, compared with 15% of visits without one.
- Links inside AI summaries received clicks in 1% of visits.
- Searches with 10 or more words triggered an AI summary 53% of the time.
An overview of eye-tracking research on AI Overviews compiles data from Pew, Microsoft and usability.de. In the usability.de study, 55% of participants read the AI summary, and about 20% of searches ended without a click. Tracking AI Overview citations and brand mentions alongside organic rankings measures a channel that traditional reporting misses.
Building a Visible AI Skill Set
According to LinkedIn data in the Work Trend Index, job posts that mention AI see 17% more growth in applications. Common ways to document AI proficiency:
- Profile skills: Listing specific tools, such as ChatGPT, Copilot or Claude, in the LinkedIn skills section.
- Certifications: Completing vendor courses from Google, Microsoft or AWS that issue verifiable credentials.
- Project portfolios: Publishing case studies, prompt libraries or automation workflows on a personal website.
- Community projects: Running AI study groups, open-source tools or nonprofit initiatives on a dedicated site.
The .org extension was introduced in 1985 and is managed by the Public Interest Registry. It has no registration restrictions. Individuals and groups can buy .org domain names for open-source projects, learning communities and nonprofit AI initiatives.
