The New Jobs Being Created by AI --- AI is raising big fears about employment losses, but it is also giving rise to new engineering and training jobs

 

“Artificial intelligence has sparked fears it will become a job killer. It's also fueling a crop of new careers.

 

AI created 640,000 jobs between 2023 and 2025 in the U.S., according to an analysis by LinkedIn of job posting data, including new white-collar positions such as head of AI and AI engineer. That tally doesn't include the huge number of temporary construction jobs tied to building the mammoth data centers AI relies on.

 

"We're not talking about enough jobs to change the direction of the labor market," said Kory Kantenga, LinkedIn's head of economics. "But for AI roles, growth has pretty much been straight up."

 

The fast-emerging new jobs help train AI to improve its performance and take on more tasks, and help train humans to use AI in their work.

 

The jobs run the gamut from high-level careers in AI strategy to hourly work. Many of these new employees work directly for AI companies, but other industries including finance, healthcare and manufacturing are also snapping up such workers as they seek to capitalize on the technology.

 

Zach Kinzler, 25, who got his master's degree in business analytics less than two years ago, assumed in February the title of head of human AI solutions at BoodleBox, an AI education startup based in Colorado Springs, Colo. His job involves client training and using AI to speed up tasks for co-workers.

 

Kinzler, who works remotely from San Diego, wanted to work with AI and said he feels lucky to land in a growing field.

 

"The conversation about whether artificial intelligence is good or bad needs to go away, because it's not going to go away," he said.

 

One of the biggest questions facing a shaky U.S. labor market that has been especially hard on white-collar workers is whether AI's ability to mimic human skills like research, writing and coding will cause significant layoffs. Big cuts at Oracle last week, while the company invests heavily in AI data centers, underscored some of these worries.

 

Corporate leaders, including some in the tech world, have issued grim forecasts about AI's potential to replace white-collar workers at a massive scale. According to a recent Goldman Sachs Research report, AI could automate tasks that account for a quarter of all working hours in the U.S., especially in fields such as administrative support, legal work and architecture and engineering.

 

Still, analysts say it's hard to judge how many job cuts thus far are genuinely attributable to AI, and which are being made for financial or operations reasons. A new survey of 750 chief financial officers found that AI had essentially no negative employment effect in 2025.

 

But data show employers are increasingly hiring for AI talent. In 2023, AI-related roles made up only 1.6% of all job postings, according to an AI job tracker co-led by Anil Gupta, professor at the University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business, and job market data company LinkUp. Two years later that figure had more than doubled to 3.4%, the tracker found.

 

One rising job is head of AI. In the three years from 2023 through 2025, companies sought to fill 225,000 such jobs, up 49% from the prior four years, according to LinkedIn job-posting data.

 

Another fast-growing job -- though often part-time -- is data annotator. People in this role help train AI models by reviewing and labeling data, including audio, text and images, so that the models can learn to recognize patterns and improve their output. From 2023 to 2025, companies added 312,000 such roles, according to LinkedIn.

 

Hiring for such jobs remains highly concentrated. As of late 2025, only 6% of companies had job ads mentioning AI, according to an analysis by jobs site Indeed, up from 2% in 2018. A fraction of all companies -- just 1% -- accounted for 90% of all such posts, including many large tech companies.

 

"We're really early in the ballgame," said Cory Stahle, an Indeed economist, who noted that it's still unclear how many dedicated employees companies will need to manage AI.

 

The technology has created some lower-end gig work: hiring workers to help improve AI models through tasks like labeling images and tagging text.

 

As AI models advance, more companies are offering generous paydays for experienced workers with specialized skills and knowledge that can't be readily scraped from the internet.

 

"If you're training a model to be better at scientific discovery, you need a chain of people who are doing scientific discovery," said Steve Nemzer, senior director of AI growth and innovation at Telus Digital, an AI training and data services provider. The company works with 12,000 data annotators in the U.S., many of them researchers who hold Ph.D.s

 

In Galveston, Texas, Daniel Millian, 42, works a 9-5 job as a pathologist at a local hospital reading biopsy slides. Afterward, he comes home and works four to five more hours as an AI trainer, typing out hypothetical medical scenarios and grading different models' responses. His side hustle pays between $90 and $200 an hour, padding his overall pay by $75,000 since last year.

 

Millian said he wants to improve technology to better address patient and clinician needs. The money is good, and he likes being able to pick his hours and work from home.

 

"At least in my profession, there aren't a lot of jobs that give you this type of flexibility," said Millian.

 

Demand for such workers has exploded, said Ali Ansari, chief executive of micro1, an AI staffing company that recruits experts to train AI models, including Millian. The company, which was founded in 2022, now employs tens of thousands of mostly part-time data annotators, around 40% of whom are based in the U.S.

 

Its annotators work in industries ranging from journalism to finance and make an average of $70 an hour, he said.

 

"These jobs aren't temporary," said Ansari, adding that in the future, he expects AI to do increasingly complex and specialized tasks, requiring a constant stream of human training.

 

Some AI workers say the jobs are a mixed bag. Since getting laid off from her intellectual property specialist job from Meta last year, Victoria Chapa, 32, has been taking on short-term AI-training gigs. Recently she has worked on assignments that involve looking at AI-generated images and describing their emotional impact, as well as efforts to train a chatbot to better mirror its users' tone.

 

"Are they good jobs? Not really. It pays the bills, but depending on what you're doing, if you're looking at images all day long, it makes you feel crazy," said Chapa, who lives in Austin, Texas. She said she worries about AI-generated images manipulating people, and is currently seeking jobs in AI governance and ethics.

 

In San Diego, Kinzler said that while he has basic coding and database skills, he's learning much of his new job in real time. His most important on-the-job skill, he said, is the ability to explain the technology in an accessible way to peers and clients.

 

"'It's kinda fake it till you make it," he said.” [1]

 

1. The New Jobs Being Created by AI --- AI is raising big fears about employment losses, but it is also giving rise to new engineering and training jobs. Te-Ping, Chen.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 08 Apr 2026: A10.