AI & Work
AI skills keep gaining ground in job advertising, but they remain a feature of a minority of vacancies. Indeed Hiring Lab’s September 24 labor-market snapshot put AI-related postings at 6.7% of U.S. job postings, up from 6.3% in its August 24 snapshot and more than double the previous peak of 3.3% in 2022. That is a measure of language in advertisements, not the share of workers who use AI and not a count of hires.
What is being counted
Indeed defines the figure as the share of AI and generative-AI job postings as a percentage of all postings, using a seven-day trailing average. Its keyword list includes terms such as machine learning, data science, artificial intelligence, generative AI, large language models and ChatGPT. The September figure appears in the snapshot’s infographic, which does not give a separate as-of date; the snapshot’s other data run through September 18.
Counting words has limits. A developer maintaining a model, a recruiter using AI to draft text and a compliance specialist reviewing AI-generated work can all be described with similar keywords while needing very different skills. A keyword count does not show which tasks actually changed inside an organization.
More AI language, not necessarily more jobs
A rising AI share can coincide with flat overall demand. The same snapshot put Indeed’s overall Job Postings Index at 103.5, about 3% above its February 2020 baseline, while newly posted listings were about 6% below that baseline. Employers can add AI requirements to vacancies they would have advertised anyway, raising the share without creating additional positions. Software development postings remained well below pre-pandemic levels, at an index of about 77 in the snapshot.
Reading a posting
For candidates, the useful question is whether an ad names a concrete tool or task, or a general aspiration such as “AI literacy.” For employers and training providers, it helps to separate AI product-development roles from ordinary jobs that ask for familiarity with an assistant. Lumping them together can overstate demand for advanced machine-learning degrees and understate the value of domain expertise and the ability to check AI output.
A better measure than keyword share would be the share of completed hires into roles with genuinely new AI responsibilities. Until such data exist, the 6.7% figure is best read as a signal of how employers describe jobs.
Sources
- Indeed Hiring Lab, “US Labor Market Snapshot: September 2026,” September 24, 2026 (AI-related postings figure in the infographic). https://hiringlab.indeed.com/2026/09/24/us-labor-market-snapshot-september-2026/
- Indeed Hiring Lab, “US Labor Market Snapshot: August 2026,” August 24, 2026. https://hiringlab.indeed.com/2026/08/24/us-labor-market-snapshot-august-2026/
Featured photo: A person works on a laptop. Representative image of online job search and applications; it is not connected to the Indeed data. Photo: Shixart1985, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0). Cropped from the original.
