AI skills now add $18,000 to your salary, new study says

I suppose ChatGPT prepared that study?

AI skills now add $18,000 to your salary, new study says

A new report shows that jobs requiring AI skills pay 28% more, and demand is growing fastest outside of tech

By Emily Price, Quartz Media

Published 20 hours ago

If you’re looking for a raise, here’s a tip: learn AI.

That’s one of the biggest takeaways from a massive new report from Lightcast, a labor market analytics company that dug into more than 1.3 billion job postings to see how artificial intelligence is really reshaping the workforce.

AI skills now add $18,000 to your salary, new study says

The headline number is hard to ignore: job postings that list AI skills pay 28% more than those that don’t. That’s almost $18,000 extra a year. But the details are where things get interesting.

It’s not just a tech thing anymore

For years, AI skills were seen as something only coders, engineers, or data scientists needed to worry about. That’s changing fast.

Lightcast found that more than half of job postings that mention AI skills — 51% as of 2024 — are now for jobs outside of IT and computer science. Even more striking: in some industries, roles that require generative AI have grown 800% since 2022.

“Companies that continue treating AI as a niche technical skill will find themselves competing for talent with organizations that have embedded AI literacy across their entire workforce,” says Cole Napper, VP of Research and Insights at Lightcast. “Educators who wait and see what impact AI will have will find that they’ve lost students and funding to other providers who include AI skills across programs — not in place of other skills, but alongside them.”

In other words, “AI literacy” is quickly going mainstream.

Making sense of the chaos: The AI Skills Disruption Matrix

To help employers and educators figure out where to focus, Lightcast has rolled out a new framework with a very sci-fi name: The AI Skills Disruption Matrix.

This system looks at three things for any given skill:

• How fast demand for that skill is growing

• How valuable it is in the broader job market

• How likely it is to be disrupted by AI

Skills fall into four buckets — Stabilizers, Challengers, Escalators, and Disruptors. That way, companies (and job seekers) can see which skills are most vulnerable, and where it makes sense to double down on training.

The industries changing the fastest

Lightcast highlights five industries where the shift is already visible:

• Marketing and PR: 8% of job postings now ask for AI skills, with the fastest growth in SEO.

• Human Resources: Growing fastest overall, up 66%, thanks to talent acquisition and analytics roles.

• Finance: Up 40% as quantitative roles adopt machine learning and generative AI.

• Science and Research: Already highly integrated, with steady demand for advanced skills.

• Education: Still early, but a 200% surge in generative AI skills shows big changes ahead.

It’s not about replacing people

While the past few years have been full of speculation about AI wiping out jobs, this report is more focused on what skills are becoming more valuable when paired with AI.

“AI-powered creator tools don’t replace people,” Napper says. “They make real people better at their work. The companies that succeed will be the ones who invest in AI skills broadly, not just in a few technical roles.”

The big takeaway? AI is moving from the sidelines to the center of how people work. And if your job — or your workforce — doesn’t have those skills yet, now’s the time to start catching up.