ChatGPT, AI jobs are growing as companies cut others

The nation's hiring market might not be as hot as it was a year ago, but jobs involving AI and ChatGPT are on fire.

According to jobs platform Adzuna, there were just three job postings on the site in May 2022 that used the term "generative AI," the class of technology that undergirds OpenAI's ChatGPT and other similar platforms. By May of this year, there were 1,496 jobs citing that term.

The number of job ads on Adzuna citing "ChatGPT" also has skyrocketed — up to 1,440 in May compared to 845 in May 2022.

For ads citing ChatGPT, the average salary listed was $133,000. For postings citing generative AI, the average salary was $146,244.

"Jobs are plentiful, and people looking for lucrative roles should keep a keen eye on AI," said James Neave, head of data science at Adzuna, in a press release announcing the company's findings. "Based on Adzuna research, we expect businesses will continue posting more job ads citing Generative AI, ChatGPT and chatbots as this year goes on."

Adzuna is not the only company that has found a spiking interest in AI-related jobs. ResumeBuilder.com recently surveyed 1,187 business leaders and found 91% of companies that are hiring want workers with ChatGPT experience.

Stories of ChatGPT and other generative AI tools answering business-degree exam questions and writing code — and more disturbingly, malware — are contrasted with the same technology getting key details wrong, accusations of potential bias, and a style of writing that critics have called bland and surface-level.

You can access the ChatGPT platform yourself here.

ChatGPT's release in 2022 led to it becoming one of the fastest-growing platforms in the world, hitting 100 million users in just two months.

Generative AI technology essentially uses a massive bank of text and phrases scraped from across the internet to predict the words that would follow a question or prompt. From there, it can generate coherent responses, although not always the correct ones — leading to what experts have dubbed "hallucinations."

While researchers at career-development website Acendance, which is published by Luminous LLC, thought most of these AI-related jobs would be in technical fields, they found instead that the jobs were spread more widely across industries. According to their research, 55% of jobs requiring ChatGPT skills come from non-technical industries such as advertising services, financial services, higher education and manufacturing. Technical industries accounted for 45% of the jobs, according to the research.

"ChatGPT skills are creating job opportunities for people from all walks of life, not just for a small group of tech industry veterans," said Luminos CEO Chas Cooper in a press release announcing the findings.

Cooper noted that the job market has only begun to see the impact of generative AI and ChatGPT, adding that there will be "creative destruction" within industries.

"It's both frightening and exciting to imagine where the job market will be a year from now. While some jobs may be eliminated or compensation reduced, I would predict we’ll also see entirely new jobs emerge and pay increase," Cooper said. "Job seekers who surf this wave by acquiring ChatGPT and other AI skills will be well positioned for the future."

Some companies are already cutting jobs because of the growing use of AI-related tools, according to a report by business and executive coaching firm Challenger Gray & Christmas Inc.

So far this year, companies have laid off 3,900 people due to the new technology, with all of them in the tech industry, the company reported in a blog post.

While the number of jobs cited by the firm is a small portion of all workers laid off so far this year, managers and companies are itching to use these new tools to cut costs.

About 66% of managers say they would gladly replace employees with AI tools if the work was comparable, according to a survey by Beautiful.ai of 3,000 U.S. workers in management positions.

Another survey of 1,000 U.S. business leaders in February by ResumeBuilder.com found about 25% of companies said ChatGPT has already saved them $75,000 or more.

IBM Corp. CEO Arvind Krishna said recently the company intends to replace nearly 8,000 jobs with AI over the next few years, with machines potentially taking over up to 30% of non-customer-facing roles in the next five years.

An April report from Goldman Sachs found the new wave of AI tools could expose about 300 million full-time jobs globally to automation over the coming years, depending on how advanced the tools become.

That being said, experts say companies need to proceed with caution when it comes to using AI to cut labor costs, as there are several important factors to consider that transcend the bottom line.

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