AI Job Creation Statistics 2026: New Roles, Hiring and Pay

Employment of data scientists is projected to increase 33.5% between 2024 and 2034, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Information security analysts, actuaries, operations research analysts, and computer and information research scientists are projected to see job growth of at least 19.0% between 2024 and 2034, and software developers are projected to add over 267,000 jobs from 2024 to 2034, the largest increase in the number of jobs among these occupations. These federal projections anchor the AI job creation statistics below.

Hiring data and employer forecasts point the same way. On Indeed in the US, measured as a share of all job postings, AI-related postings have climbed to 6.3%, well past their prior peak of 3.3% in 2022, as of August 2026, and the World Economic Forum projects that AI and data processing alone will create 11 million roles and replace 9 million by 2030. The sections below track the footprint of artificial intelligence (AI) in hiring and headcount, across job postings, company data and data centers.

Key Takeaways

• AI specialist job postings soared (68.9% rise) from 2024 to 2025 while total job growth rose only 8.6%, both measured in job postings, per PwC.
• Wage premiums for workers with AI skills have risen to 62%, from 57% in last year’s Barometer, measured as the gap in advertised salaries between job postings that require AI skills and those that do not, per PwC.
• US software development job postings have grown by almost 15% since the launch of Claude Code in late February, 2025, while overall job postings fell by 7% over the same period, Indeed data show.
• Six in every 1,000 US job postings are now data center-related, up from 2 per 1,000 in May 2023, counting Indeed postings that mention data centers, per Indeed Hiring Lab’s July 2026 analysis.
• US job postings reached 822 distinct AI-touched titles by the first quarter of 2026, 8.3% of all titles (AI-touched titles have at least five AI-titled postings in a quarter; the share is of all Indeed occupation titles with at least five postings), according to Indeed Hiring Lab.
• AI-related employment decreases are rare, occurring in only 2% of firms that use AI, while 44% of AI-using firms report augmenting worker tasks, and 66% of firms experiencing task effects do so exclusively, according to a US Census Bureau survey of firms.

Editor’s Choice

• Projected new software developer jobs, 2024 to 2034: 267,700, per BLS.
• Active AI-skill job postings, new and carried over, in CompTIA’s US tech jobs release, August 2026: surpassing 320,000 openings, per CompTIA.
• AI-related share of US job postings on Indeed, August 2026: 6.3%.
• Projected roles created by AI and data processing by 2030, per the World Economic Forum: 11 million, while replacing 9 million.
• Projected net new jobs by 2030 across all structural trends: 78 million jobs, per the World Economic Forum.
• Headcount growth, most vs least AI-exposed companies: 52% vs 36%, per PwC, growth since 2018, with exposure set by each company’s sector.

US Occupations Projected to Grow With AI

About This Data

• Compiled from 13 sources: 3 US government releases and 10 research, industry and employer-survey reports.
• The oldest source dates from January 2025 and the newest figures cover August 2026. Figures appear as their sources state them, except one labeled calculation from World Economic Forum totals.
• Job postings, projections and measured employment are labeled separately, and the page is reviewed on a rolling basis as sources publish new editions.
• Adoption of AI technologies, including generative AI tools, is expected to fuel strong job growth among computer and mathematical occupations in coming years, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
• Data scientists are projected to add 82,500 jobs over the decade, and information security analysts 52,100.
• Total employment across all occupations is projected to grow by 5,211,800 jobs between 2024 and 2034.
• On the other side of the ledger, customer service representatives are projected to change by -153,700 jobs, one of the occupations where demand is expected to be limited.

Source: US Bureau of Labor Statistics Employment Projections, July 2026

How Many Jobs Are Projected to Grow With AI?

The number of software developers is projected to grow by 15.8% over this period, an increase of over 267,000 jobs from 2024 to 2034, where the Bureau of Labor Statistics expects IT, including AI, to boost demand. The World Economic Forum projects that AI and data processing alone will create 11 million roles and replace 9 million by 2030. Both figures are projections, not hires already made.

AI Specialist Job Postings by Sector

• For every one AI specialist job posting in 2012 there are now 10.7, compared with 2.5 for all job postings, according to PwC, counting job postings in the countries with data back to 2012.
• PwC counts jobs that require advanced AI skills such as prompt engineering or machine learning as AI specialist jobs.
• The Technology, Media, and Telecoms (TMT) sector leads all sectors in AI hiring intensity, with nearly one in eight new job roles now AI related, measured as the share of the sector’s job postings that require at least one AI skill.
• Human Health continues an upward trend in adoption, increasing from 0.7% in 2024. AI hiring in healthcare remains the smallest share of the four sectors shown.

Recent Developments

• August 2026: Active job postings requiring AI-related capabilities surpassed 320,000 openings in August, a 4.5% increase from July, counting new and carried-over postings, according to CompTIA’s analysis of Lightcast data in its US tech jobs release.
• August 24, 2026: Postings on Indeed for Software Development roles (74.4) remain significantly below their pre-pandemic level but have increased from a low of 61.1 in May 2025, on Indeed’s seasonally adjusted postings index, where February 1, 2020 equals 100.
• August 10, 2026: Brookings updated its research finding that labor markets that receive their first large data center see employment rise in the data processing sector by 56% over the first decade of operations.
• July 14, 2026: Indeed Hiring Lab reported that the largest 10 tech firms account for 71% of data center postings in 2026.
• July 8, 2026: Indeed Hiring Lab found that over the past year, the most AI-exposed occupations have generally seen the largest rebound in postings.
• July 8, 2026: A second Indeed Hiring Lab analysis found that in five of the six countries examined, more than half of all AI-touched job titles are now outside tech occupations.

AI Job Titles in US and European Job Postings

• In the US, the count dipped from 264 in 2022 (or 2.6% of all titles with at least 5 postings) to 159 in 2023 before climbing steeply, according to Indeed Hiring Lab.
• By early 2026, AI-touched titles made up about 1 in 12 of all US titles in January-March.
• In Europe, AI-touched titles made up 4.2% of all titles in Germany, 3.3% in France and 2.7% in the UK in Q1 2026.
• Employers are increasingly incorporating AI into business operations, creating demand for workers who can apply AI tools, manage AI-enabled workflows, and support AI-driven initiatives, CompTIA research indicates.

AI Job Titles Outside Tech

• In the US, recent postings include an “AI Autonomous Truck Test Driver” and a “Physical Therapist (AI Documentation)”, per Indeed Hiring Lab.
• Spain is the exception, where 64% of AI-touched job titles remain tech roles.
• Several industry sectors, including retail, wholesale trade, and educational services, also recorded month-over-month gains in new technology job postings in August, according to CompTIA.
• Tech hiring is not confined to software companies: retail and Education employers are posting more tech roles too.

Software Development Job Postings Rebound

• Job postings for occupations with more potential exposure to AI-driven change, including software development, generally fell the most between 2022 and 2026, according to Indeed Hiring Lab.
• Overall job postings are essentially the same as in February 2020, while software development postings sit well below that level.
• The rebound in software roles is concentrated rather than broad, as the senior and AI-titled shares below show.

Source: Indeed Hiring Lab, July 2026

Key finding: Indeed Hiring Lab concludes that “The relationship between AI exposure and job postings appears to be flipping, from job destruction to job creation.” The rebound is real but starts from a low base, and most of it comes from senior and AI-titled roles rather than entry-level hiring.

Tech Occupation Hiring and AI Job Postings in the US

• Tech occupation employment, which includes tech professionals working across all industry sectors, increased by 86,000 workers in August, CompTIA’s analysis of BLS data shows.
• Inside the tech industry itself, tech companies reduced staffing by about 14,700 positions, inclusive of both technical and non-technical positions.
• There were nearly 600,000 active technology occupation postings during the month, with 42% representing newly advertised positions.
• Indeed measures the share of AI (and generative AI) job postings, as a percentage of overall job postings, using a seven-day trailing average. That count covers traditional AI terms and Generative AI terms such as large language models.

Headcount and Wage Growth at AI-Exposed Companies

• Productivity growth is 40% higher at companies most exposed to AI versus least, according to PwC, which measures productivity as turnover per employee against a 2018 baseline and assigns AI exposure by each company’s sector.
• The top fifth of most-exposed companies achieve 163% productivity growth on average, where PwC ranks its most-exposed quartile by productivity growth and averages the top 20%.

Worth noting: PwC cautions that ORBIS company data is not intended to represent economy-wide employment growth, because firms that exited the market during the period are excluded, creating a survivorship bias. The useful finding is the gap between exposure groups rather than the absolute growth rates.

AI Skills Wage Premium

• The average AI wage premium across sectors stands at 61.9%, with most of the key sectors analyzed exceeding this benchmark, according to PwC, which averages the advertised-salary gap across 16 sectors.
• Jobs professionalized by AI, where AI does the basic work leaving more expert tasks for people, make up 22% of advertised jobs and are thriving, while jobs democratized by AI, where AI takes on the complex work, make up 52% and fall behind.
• Numbers of professionalized jobs are growing twice as fast as democratized ones, with 42% higher wage growth, based on job postings since 2018 and advertised salaries since 2021 in six countries.

Source: PwC 2026 Global AI Jobs Barometer, Lightcast job postings data; salary growth covers six countries

Data Center Jobs From the AI Build-Out

• Over the past two years, job postings for data center roles have more than doubled, while total job postings in the US fell roughly 12% and postings for tech jobs other than data center jobs fell by 6%, according to Indeed Hiring Lab.
• The hiring footprint of the largest 10 tech firms in smaller metros like Columbus, Jackson and Reno has jumped from under 2% of local postings in mid-2025 to over 10%, according to Indeed Hiring Lab’s July 2026 analysis.
• Brookings researchers caution that large data center projects often promise only dozens to a few hundred permanent workers while the associated construction jobs are temporary.

Source: Indeed Hiring Lab, July 2026

Why it matters: Brookings researchers estimate that at a typical treated county, these estimates imply roughly 100-200 jobs, depending on facility type, and wages were unchanged. Data center hiring is real, but the permanent local payoff is counted in hundreds of jobs, while the construction surge is temporary.

AI Use by US Firm Size and Sector

• Census Bureau survey data show overall AI usage hovered between 17% and 20%, and between 20% and 23% of businesses expected to be using it in the next six months, from December 2025 to May 2026.
• Less than 20% of firms with four or fewer employees reported using AI.
• AI use increased among firms with at least 20 employees but didn’t change significantly among firms with fewer than 20 employees over that period.
• About 42% of businesses in the Information sector and roughly 39% in Finance and Insurance expected to use AI in their business functions over the next six months.
• In a November 2025 to January 2026 survey supplement, 18% of firms used AI in a business function; on an employment-weighted basis, the share is 32%.

Where US Firms Deploy AI

• The Census Bureau working paper finds adoption is expected to reach 22% within six months.
• On the worker side, in the November 2025 to January 2026 reference period, 23% of firms (representing 41% of employment) report AI integration into tasks related to business functions.
• Writing, document analysis, and information search are the leading Generative AI use in tasks.
• Regression analysis shows a robust positive correlation between firm commercial performance and the breadth of AI integration. The paper keeps a descriptive rather than causal interpretation of these associations, and it finds that functional breadth and operational investment are positively associated with employment decreases; among firms with a positive AI use index value, its regressions also include whether a firm experienced a decrease in total employment attributed to AI use in the last six months.

Source: US Census Bureau working paper CES-26-25, April 2026

AI Job Creation Forecasts to 2030

• The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 projects that, on current trends over the 2025 to 2030 period, job creation and destruction due to structural labor-market transformation will amount to 22% of today’s total jobs, measured against the 1.2 billion formal jobs in the report’s dataset, which the report calls a subset of ILO total employment data.
• The report projects net growth of 7% of total employment, or 78 million jobs within that dataset, a total it attributes to “structural labour-market transformation” across all trends rather than AI alone.
• AI and data processing alone are projected to come out about 2 million roles ahead by 2030, based on the report’s created and replaced figures for that trend.
• The three fastest-growing jobs in percentage terms are big data specialists, fintech engineers and AI and machine learning specialists, per surveyed executives. Two of those three roles sit squarely in Machine Learning and data work.
• 86% of respondents to the survey expected AI and information processing technologies to transform their business by 2030.
• Robots and automation, meanwhile, are forecast to displace 5 million more jobs than they create. Automation hardware trends are tracked in the AI in robotics data.
• The report surveyed more than 1,000 companies around the world, representing 22 industry clusters and more than 14 million workers.

Is AI Actually Creating More Jobs?

In job postings, AI-related demand is climbing; in firm headcounts, AI-related changes are still rare in both directions. On Indeed in the US, measured as a share of all job postings, AI-related postings have climbed to 6.3%, well past their prior peak of 3.3% in 2022, and the Census Bureau reports that AI-related employment decreases are rare, occurring in only 2% of firms that use AI, while AI-related employment increases occur at a nearly equal rate, 2.3% of AI-using firms (firm-weighted).

The World Economic Forum projects that AI and data processing alone will create 11 million roles and replace 9 million by 2030, and Brookings finds that data centers do create local jobs, with caveats. Announced layoffs tied to AI are tracked separately in the job loss from AI figures.

Conclusion: What AI Job Creation Statistics Show

The latest AI job creation statistics show employment of data scientists is projected to increase 33.5% over the current BLS projection decade, while AI-related postings have climbed to 6.3% of US postings on Indeed. Demand is running ahead of measured employment, and company data point to augmentation more often than cuts.

Job seekers adding AI skills, installation and maintenance workers near data center builds, and hiring managers planning headcount gain the most from reading postings beside employment data, starting with Indeed’s monthly AI postings tracker and the next BLS projections cycle.