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While considerations about synthetic intelligence making human jobs out of date have been widespread over the previous three years, a brand new research suggests the other could also be true. According to PwC, firms are discovering that staff who successfully use AI have gotten extra useful, they usually’re getting raises consequently.
AI-exposed jobs are driving wage development
Globally, wages are rising twice as quick in AI-exposed industries — i.e., industries the place AI can help with a variety of duties — in comparison with sectors that may largely solely be finished manually. This is as a result of those that leverage AI can improve their productiveness and create higher worth; AI-exposed industries expertise 3 times greater development in income per worker.
As a outcome, staff with AI abilities, similar to immediate engineering, can command a major wage premium. On common, they earn 56% greater than colleagues in the identical roles who lack these abilities. That premium has greater than doubled since final yr, when it stood at 25%.
Researchers at PwC analysed almost a billion job advertisements throughout six continents to compile information for its 2025 Global AI Jobs Barometer. They discovered that AI adoption has grown throughout each business, together with historically low-tech sectors similar to mining and agriculture. All these sectors pay greater wages for AI abilities.
While the payoff is huge, maintaining with AI abilities is difficult work
However, it’s not all sunshine and roses. Having the proper AI abilities can certainly result in excessive wages, however these talent necessities change shortly.
The PwC analysis discovered that abilities wanted to safe an AI-exposed function change 66% quicker than for different jobs, up from 25% final yr. This displays the extreme race amongst tech giants like OpenAI and Google to develop new highly effective AI instruments, which might trickle all the way down to enterprises at an analogous tempo.
It’s additionally not sufficient to easily acquire a level to safe these AI-exposed roles, as fewer employers are actually requiring them of their job ads. Between 2019 and 2024, the share of job listings requiring a level dropped from 53% to 44% for roles the place AI can independently carry out lots of the related duties. For jobs the place AI merely helps people carry out duties extra successfully, the proportion requiring a level additionally declined, from 66% to 59%.
Nevertheless, far fewer jobs in non-AI-exposed industries require levels — solely 11% in 2024. But the hole is narrowing as diploma necessities decline throughout each forms of roles.
PwC’s research discovered that in each nation analyzed, extra girls than males are employed in AI-exposed roles. Therefore, because the tempo of change accelerates, they might face higher challenges in holding their abilities updated, probably placing their long-term job safety at a higher danger than that of their male counterparts.
“AI’s rapid advance is not just re-shaping industries, but fundamentally altering the workforce and the skills required. This is not a situation that employers can easily buy their way out of,” Pete Brown, Global Workforce Leader at PwC, mentioned in a assertion. “Even if they can pay the premium required to attract talent with AI skills, those skills can quickly become out of date without investment in the systems to help the workforce learn.”
Read eWeek’s protection about AI profession path alternatives. The common annual wage is supplied for every job title.
