AI and the Job Market: A Look at the New Careers Shaping the Future

There’s plenty of chatter about the way generative AI tools will reshape the job market, and most of it is focused on the threats to jobs and negative impacts. Though AI will certainly cause ripples and disruption, it’s also creating a new wave of highly compensated careers.

Here are three relatively new, high-paying, and rapidly growing career fields, all thanks to the surge in AI adoption.

AI Specialist

As more and more “normies” start using consumer-friendly AI tools, we’re seeing a sort of AI arms race. All the big companies are trying to edge in on the generative AI gold rush — and of course there are tons of AI use cases that don’t rely on the large language models powering generative AI systems.

As AI continues to proliferate, there are two sides to succeeding with the technology. Everyday nonspecialists will need to learn how to use new AI tools, but the tech industry has a growing need for qualified AI specialists, too. These are the people who understand what’s going on under the hood, who can build new AI tools and improve existing ones.

Where coders and developers came to dominate the 2000s and 2010s, professionals who can build and work on AI systems could rise to a similar status in the mid-2020s and beyond.

AI Ethics Officer

AI systems are increasingly capable, which many people view as an unqualified good. But as these systems grow more powerful and more intelligent, they generate all sorts of ethical considerations.

Remember just how bad some of the early ML-powered systems did in terms of bias and fairness? Now imagine what could happen when you unleash AI tools that mimic human thought and creativity.

AI ethics officers help businesses use AI tools in ethical ways, reducing bias and improving fairness. And at the upper end of this job category are AI ethics professionals who work on AI systems themselves.

AI Trainers and Prompt Engineers

AI trainers, sometimes called prompt engineers, are people who work both on the back end and as intermediaries with end users to guide AI models and to figure out the best ways to communicate with them.

Say you wanted to write a newsletter like this one, and you want to use GPT-4 as a starting point. Some ways you might prompt GPT-4 will get you better results than others.

Prompt engineers work in at least two distinct positions. Some work for businesses that want to get the most out of generative AI tools (and so need someone who can create killer prompts). Others work for AI businesses themselves, helping train the models or providing assistance to customers who can’t get the AI tools to do what they want them to do.

Other AI trainers function more like traditional trainers, only with AI systems as their “students.” Commercial AI systems, like advanced customer service chatbots, need to learn the ins and outs of a business’s brand, rules, and customer approach. An AI trainer makes this happen.

We’re skeptical that AI is about to usher in a “jobs apocalypse” — what’s more likely is that AI tools improve many workers’ outputs. And as with all previous technological shifts, new AI technology will create new fields and new employment opportunities like the three we’ve looked at here.