The AI surge creates more jobs and causes companies to hire more

For organizations creating a long-term strategy around generative artificial intelligence, the technology has the capacity to create jobs for humans, not just automate them. AI job posts on global work marketplace Upwork increased more than 1,000% in the second quarter of 2023 compared to the same period last year — evidence of the industry’s momentum. Despite the fast-moving nature of this technology, keeping the human in the loop, it seems, is here to stay. When it comes to the use of generative AI at work, “The genie’s not going back in the bottle,” said Margaret Lilani, Upwork’s vice president of talent solutions. The data echoes this sentiment. While job posts in all fields are up 230% on Upwork year-over-year for Q2 of 2023, it’s AI-related jobs that are carrying these positive metrics forward. Among the roles: Deep learning engineers, AI chatbot developers, prompt engineers, data annotators, Stable Diffusion and Dall-E artists, OpenAI Codex specialists and much more. Then there are even more nuanced roles, such as AI ethicists (whose job is, essentially, to maintain a responsible AI framework). Not only are there more types of jobs as a result of the generative AI boom, but companies are actually hiring more because of the generative AI surge. While the industry is likely to even out in the future, a recent Upwork study shows that plan to hire more freelancers and full-time employees to accommodate the increasing capacity for thoughtful, creative work accelerated by AI.