How do you make sense of a concept as large as AI? It’s an industry generating hundreds of billions of dollars of sales, with companies collectively valued in the trillions, making tools that are a day-to-day reality for the global labor force. No other development has transformed so much, so quickly. But how can we understand it? A 456-page overview, produced by the world’s leading experts on the subject, is a good place to start. 

The 2025 AI Index Report from the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI (HAI), is out now. The AI Index offers a comprehensive, data-driven report on artificial intelligence, with eight chapters: Research and Development, Technical Performance, Responsible AI, Economy, Science and Medicine, Policy, Education, and Public Opinion. As its authors write, “In a domain advancing at breakneck speed, the Index provides essential context—helping us understand where AI stands today, how it got here, and where it may be headed next.”

Lightcast is one of seven organizations recognized for contributing data and analysis to the 2025 AI Index, and we’ve contributed every year since 2021. Here are four key trends to watch as AI intersects with the labor market around the world. 

Generative AI: Scaling New Heights

When OpenAI released ChatGPT in December 2022, it created a new wave of development and innovation around generative AI, and chat interfaces specifically. Since then, the number of US job postings citing generative AI skills have surged, and in 2024 demand for Generative AI related skills reached new heights, increasing by nearly a factor of four compared to 2023. In 2024, more than 66,000 postings specifically mentioned generative AI as a skill, up from 16,000 in 2023. Mentions of large language modeling grew from 5,000 to 20,000, while demand for prompt engineering rose from 1,400 to nearly 6,300 postings.

AI Skills' Dramatic Uptick

Job postings make possible an analysis of specific skills and skill clusters (i.e., groups of skills), and this year we have a new most sought-after AI skill cluster in the US labor market. For the first time, "artificial intelligence" as a skill cluster has surpassed machine learning, which has been the skill cluster asked for most since we began tracking these types of skills in 2010.

Also of note is the steep upswing in "Generative AI", as a skill cluster, from 0.05% in 2023 to 0.22% in 2024—growing by nearly a factor of four. In fact, since last year, most AI-related skill clusters tracked by Lightcast have had an increase in market share, with the exception of autonomous driving and robotics.

Global Growth

Lightcast defines an AI job posting as any job posting that requires at least one skill in AI, such as machine learning or natural language processing. Most countries studied have seen large growth in AI job postings overall over the past several years and again in the past year. The US labor market saw a 20% rise in demand for AI skills between 2023 and 2024, Canada 4% and the UK 2%.

Singapore continues to feature an exceptionally high concentration of AI skills, and maintains that status again this year, while the US accounts for the largest number of AI job postings globally. In 2024, approximately 1.8% of job postings in the US labor market mentioned AI related skills, only behind Singapore (3.2%), Luxembourg (2.0%) and Hong Kong (1.9%).

Overall Job Postings Bounce Back

One significant pattern from the two charts above is that it shows how most countries saw an increase in job posting share from 2023 to 2024. That may seem unremarkable—AI is growing fast almost everywhere—but it stands out because of the decrease across the board last year. Many countries saw their overall share of postings go down, and many skills also saw their share decrease from 2022 to 2023. 

Here’s what we said at the time—which you can read this in the first issue of On The Job, sent nearly a year ago:

"This is a good example of a situation where data can’t think for itself: the lines on the charts can help guide our understanding of AI in the labor market, but they can’t tell the full story.

If we limited our scope to only the years 2022 and 2023, we’d conclude that demand for AI in the labor market is dropping fast. But we know that’s not true…The full picture shows us that demand for AI jobs and skills is still a steady climb upward. “

And the latest data confirms that steady climb. The full Stanford AI Index 2025 is available now, all 456 pages, or you can go straight to Chapter 4, featuring the Lightcast data, to see how the global labor market is responding to this historic disruption. 

Thanks for reading On The Job. Be sure to catch up on our past issues (including "Return-To-Office is Creating Two Classes of Worker," "The Inflation Equations,“, and last year's Stanford AI Index overview: What Happens When AI Job Postings Go Down?” and you can also subscribe here. We’ll see you next time.