AI is not currently replacing jobs, but rather augmenting them. In terms of planning a future-ready workforce, expect AI to become a normal part of most jobs, with durable skills playing a key complementary role.

AI skills open up new career pathways. Identifying which AI skills help people progress in their careers is key for training, upskilling, and reskilling them to make them more employable, productive, and future-ready.

The US is outstripping other nations for the highest demand for Generative AI. Identifying global AI skills hotspots is vital for employers seeking to understand where to source or locate their future-ready workforce.

Look for opportunities to include the teaching of in-demand AI skills and key complementary durable skills in your courses and programs, informed by the kind of up-to-date insights on the future-ready workforce we’ve presented in the Lightcast Global AI Skills Outlook.

Look to harness the power of data to understand the AI skills-related interventions that are needed in your area, so that you can invest in training, upskilling, and reskilling your local population to equip them to take their place in the workforce of the future.

Look to build a future-ready workforce by integrating AI tools into your workplace, along with the appropriate training to upskill your workforce in both AI and complementary durable skills, creating clear career pathways for your staff and enhancing productivity.

For over two decades, Lightcast has been a pioneer in big-data analysis of job postings. The data we've used throughout this page is sourced from the Lightcast Global Job Postings dataset, which is a library of billions of job postings collected daily from thousands of job boards, newspapers and employers sites across the globe. These postings are cleaned and deduplicated to ensure only one posting is counted for each opening, before being classified to extract meaningful information about the location, industry, occupation, skills required and any other relevant insights, using a combination of official and proprietary taxonomies. The advantage of using online job postings is that, unlike official statistics, they present a unique opportunity to get insights from a large amount of almost real-time data on employers’ needs.

To capture demand for AI skills in online job postings, we built a definition of AI skills using the Lightcast Open Skills Taxonomy, which includes over 32,000 different skill terms, organised hierarchically in 32 categories and 400 subcategories, capturing all the skills employers mention in job postings. From this taxonomy, we identified over 200 AI skills, and grouped them into a range of skill clusters. Job postings mentioning at least one of these AI skills were considered to be AI postings. This custom definition of artificial intelligence job postings is the same used in a long-standing collaboration with the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, with which Lightcast has partnered in publication of the AI Index Report since 2020. 

All the data throughout the Lightcast Global AI Skills Outlook were extracted from the Lightcast Global Job Postings Dataset, which includes over two billion current and historical job postings in over 150 countries. This dataset also offers far more granular geographical levels than we’ve shown in this page, as well as far greater occupation specificity through the Lightcast Occupation Taxonomy, which includes over 700 occupations and 1,900 specialized occupations. The really exciting thing, however, is that we don’t just keep this data to ourselves. Rather, we offer it to our customers through a variety of software tools, as well as via Snowflake and API. Get in touch today to talk about how your organization can become future-ready by accessing our comprehensive datasets through these tools.