Do you employ a forward engineer? How about a data annotator? Forensic analyst, anyone? There has been a lot of coverage of the jobs that might disappear due to agentic artificial intelligence—the technology which learns about your business from the data you feed it and then undertakes many of the tasks itself. Less prominent is the story of the jobs that will, and are already, being created. “In the near term, AI is creating more jobs than it is replacing,” reads an against-the-grain report by LinkedIn, the social media and employment platform. We should all give thanks for that.
The irritating thing about the future, a chief financial officer might muse, is that preparing for it costs money—and often an awful lot of it. At this stage of AI development, businesses are spending much of that hiring people, not building bots. In a bleak employment landscape, every little helps.
“The broader macroeconomic uncertainty that we’re seeing continues to play out in the labor market, which is stuck in a pretty low gear,” says Sue Duke, LinkedIn’s Head of Global Public Policy and Managing Director for EMEA. “Hiring is sluggish. Momentum is broadly not there. For the most part, in advanced economies, we’re seeing hiring about 20% below where it was pre-pandemic.
