Can Job Postings Data Track AI Demand?

The rise of AI is reshaping the labour market - but tracking its impact is anything but simple. Employers are still working out what they need, technologies are evolving fast, and AI is not just about adding new skills, but fundamentally changing the way work gets done. What data allows us to identify, track, and quantify the disruption AI is bringing to the global labor market? Job postings offer one possible solution. 

To read more about factors affecting the global labour market like AI, labour shortages, and geopolitics, read our latest research, Fault Lines.

Job postings as a proxy for emerging trends

Job postings have long been used as a proxy to track emerging demand. They’re one of the only real-time sources we have that come straight from employers, without assumptions. In fact, Daron Acemoglu (who won the Nobel Prize for economics in 2024 ) used US job postings to study the impact of AI on the labour market. But this isn’t the only example - job postings data has helped us track emerging trends from cybersecurity to green jobs - well before these appeared in official statistics.

The value of job postings data to track AI demand

When it comes to AI, postings help capture directional shifts. If you can identify which skills are AI skills, and which jobs are AI jobs, you can see  which employers are actively recruiting for AI talent, which skills are being mentioned, and how those demands are evolving over time. 

Lightcast has identified over 350 AI skills across nine clusters, and a job posting is considered an AI job if it includes one or more of those skills. This offers give us intelligence that is concrete and actionable. In the absence of other timely sources, that’s powerful.

What job postings data misses about AI’s impact on the labour market

AI demand is messy. Job postings only reflect what employers choose to include in ads. When it comes to AI, employers may not yet know what to ask for. Some may use buzzwords without clear meaning. Others may consider AI skills so ubiquitous they are not even worth mentioning. Others still may be reskilling their workforce internally, without posting externally at all.

So what’s the bottom line?

Job postings data won’t give us the full picture on AI - but it’s one of the best signals we’ve got. It’s imperfect, but it’s real-time, direct-from-source, and useful for understanding emerging trends. Through job postings data, companies can make decisions about hiring, paying, and skilling your people, and educators can use these insights to adjust what they teach to align it to labour market needs.

At Lightcast, we’ve been using job postings to study AI demand for years. In fact, we have a new report coming up offering actionable guidance on how to embed AI in learning and development and program planning. The report will introduce a new AI Skill Disruption Matrix to track how AI skills are evolving across functions, pinpointing where educators and L&D leaders should focus to keep training aligned with labor market demands.