AI Jobs Jump Amid IT Job Slump

(jijomathaidesigners/Shutterstock)

If you’re looking for a job in IT, chances are good that it’s an AI-related job, according to data from the University of Maryland and LinkUp, which found that the number of AI jobs has increased dramatically since the release of ChatGPT in late 2022 while the overall job market–and the IT job market in particular–have softened.

Researchers from the University of Maryland Robert H. Smith School of Business worked with LinkUp to pour over job postings to detect trends that might be useful for employers and employees alike. They shared the results of their collaboration in a visual manner via UMD-LinkUp AI Maps, which they claimed was the first tool for mapping the creation and distribution of jobs across the US.

The short story of what they found is that there has been a big uptick in AI-related jobs since the fall of 2022, while at the same time the number of IT related jobs has dropped. Specifically, the researchers found that the number of AI job postings grew by 68% from the fourth quarter of 2022 to the fourth quarter of 2024, to a total of 49,577 jobs across the US. At the same time, the number of IT jobs decreased by 27% to 354,070 jobs during the same time period.

The researchers call this the “ChatGPT Effect.” Interestingly, OpenAI launched ChatGPT during a nadir in AI jobs, according to data on the LinkUp AI Maps site. Only 7,025 AI jobs were posted in December 2022, compared to 26,430 in October 2021. Employers had nearly 25,000 open AI jobs as recently as March 2022 before they plummeted by more than two-thirds by the end of the year.

What’s more, despite the ChatGPT Effect, we have yet to reach those frothy October 2021 heights. The most recent month for AI jobs, April 2025, shows that employers posted ads for 23,208 AI jobs that month.

The majority of AI jobs are concentrated in five industries (Image source: via UMD-LinkUp AI Maps)

That may be due to the overall decline in the job market. From the fourth quarter of 2022 to the fourth quarter of 2024, the number of all job postings declined by 17%. The unemployment rate has also increased. It went from a historic low of 3.5% in September 2022 to 4.3% in July 2024. The current unemployment rate is 4.2%.

While the number of AI jobs–which the researchers define as a job that requires AI skills–is still a small fraction of the overall number of IT jobs, the ratio of AI jobs to overall IT jobs has more than doubled. It went from 8.3% of all jobs in late 2022 to 19.2% over the jobs in late 2024, according to the researchers.

The researchers also found that nearly all of the AI jobs listings exist in one of five sectors: Professional, scientific, and technical services; information; manufacturing; finance and insurance; and retail trade. These “Big 5” industries accounted for 89% of the AI jobs, while accounting for only about 47% of all jobs. By comparison, health care and social assistance and food services account for almost 28% of all jobs, but only had 1.5% of  AI jobs.

One of the reasons for this change is that companies in less-technically advanced sectors have essentially outsourced much of their AI work to services firms. Accenture, Deloitte, EY, PwC, Booz Allen and their peers belong to the professional, scientific, and technical services sector, the researchers say in the group’s second white paper, “Diffusion of AI Jobs Across Economic Sectors.”

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