The Job Market Doesn’t Care If You Don't Believe in AI

Skeptics risk being unemployable and most don’t know it yet

Hey there, I’m Alberto! 👋 Each week, I publish long-form AI analysis covering culture, philosophy, and business for The Algorithmic Bridge. Paid subscribers also get Monday news commentary and Friday how-to guides. I publish occasional extra articles. If you’d like to become a paid subscriber, here’s a button for that:

Your opinion about AI is irrelevant. The hiring manager’s opinion is the one that pays your rent, and I think it’s pretty clear what the average recruiter thinks when you look at job postings, full of AI-related requirements that didn’t exist 18-36 months ago: complex prompt techniques, multi-agent workflows, RAG pipelines, LLM integration, OpenClaw, MCP, experience with GPT-5.3-Codex or Claude Code 4.6 Opus, Google Antigravity, etc. These requirements were written by people who may not fully understand them (and couldn’t care less either way). It doesn’t matter.

This is not a piece about whether AI is good or bad. Whether it’s overhyped or underhyped (is that possible?). Whether the productivity gains are real or imaginary. None of that matters for what I’m about to tell you, because the job market has already made its decision, and that decision is binding whether it’s correct or not.

You’d do well to remember this fact: if your future livelihood does not depend solely on yourself, then your beliefs are not the only thing that defines your fate. Make sure you understand what the world wants from you and deliver, regardless of how you feel about it.

I. THE NUMBERS ON THE WALL

The number of workers in occupations where AI fluency is explicitly required has grown sevenfold in two years—from roughly 1 million in 2023 to around 7 million in 2025, according to McKinsey. Job postings requiring AI skills surged 73% from 2023 to 2024 and then another 109% from 2024 to 2025. In IT specifically, 78% of job postings now mention AI-related skills, according to a Cisco report. AI-related job postings grew 7.5% last year, per PwC, even as total job postings fell 11.3%.

The overall job market is contracting while the AI-skilled slice of it is expanding. If you’re inside that slice, the odds are tilting in your favor. If you’re outside it… Well, you really should not be outside it.

It’s not just tech roles.

Four of the top ten occupations now requiring AI expertise are non-technical: marketing managers, market research analysts, sales managers, and chemists (if this list sounds arbitrary is because it is: every job that uses either a lot of data or a computer will eventually require AI skills). The skills employers are asking for in AI-exposed jobs are changing 66% faster than in other roles. The premium for having AI skills in your résumé—doing the same job, same title, same seniority, etc.—is 56%, up from 25% last year.

If you happen to be employed by one such company rather than looking for a job, you might 1) not feel the urge to update, or 2) expect them to train you. Well, don’t: Forrester’s research found that only 16% of workers have high “AI readiness.” Companies aren’t investing in training. Only 23% of AI decision-makers say their organizations offered prompt engineering—perhaps the simplest among the required skills—last year.

A 56% wage premium for listing the right words on a résumé is absolutely crazy. I say “listing the right words” because let’s be honest here: you don’t need to like AI as a technology. Your enthusiasm may buy you some sympathy, but at the end of the day, what your employer wants from you is familiarity and proficiency.

II. THE SKEPTIC’S COUNTER

Now, I can already hear the objections, and some of them are perfectly reasonable: Job postings are aspirational documents, not accurate descriptions of what people do.

The HR department of your average company copy-pastes requirements from templates. Hiring managers add “AI skills” the way they once added “Office,” and then “Transferable Skills,” and then “Full Stack.” It’s a checkbox more than a hard filter. Plenty of people get hired without half the skills listed on the posting. We’ve all been asked for ten years of experience in a framework that’s existed for three (generative AI is, by the way, a good example of this: we are still so early).

There’s data to support the skepticism, too. A study published this month by the National Bureau of Economic Research surveyed 6,000 CEOs and executives. The results are rather surprising if we compare with those in the previous section: two-thirds of their firms use AI (ok, cool), but the average usage amounts to 1.5 hours per week (hmm, not much), and there’s near-zero measurable impact on productivity or employment (wait, what?).

Apollo’s chief economist, Torsten Slok, put it memorably: “AI is everywhere except in the incoming macroeconomic data. You don’t see AI in the employment data, productivity data, or inflation data.” This might sound familiar. It’s exactly what economist and Nobel laureate Robert Solow observed about the computer, which he famously captured in this slogan: “You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.”

So maybe the job postings are posturing. Maybe the AI requirements are theater, a corporate performance of modernity that evaporates the moment someone without the presumed qualifications but genuinely competent walks in the door for an interview.

Maybe.

III. DOES IT EVEN MATTER?

Let me repeat that: does it even matter? Does it matter that the postings are mostly fake? Does it matter that AI is not providing productivity gains across the board? The answer is a resounding NO. Let me tell you why. Carve this in your forehead. You will want to remember this every single time you look in the mirror.