Ai exposure changes advertised job responsibilities moderately
AI Exposure and the Changing Responsibilities in Job Postings
Computers and Society
Summary
Work activities in job postings are shifting as artificial intelligence (AI) tools become more common. The authors studied 50,000 job ads from 33 companies between 2023 and 2025, focusing on how tasks relate to AI use. They found that while mentions of AI are up a lot, the actual job responsibilities linked to AI show only a small decline in prevalence. At the same time, responsibilities that do involve AI often explicitly require working with it, showing employers want people to handle tasks alongside AI tools.
What this means in practice
- •For human resource teams: Analyze job postings to better understand which work responsibilities are increasingly linked to AI use or decline in demand.
- •For labor market analysts: Track how AI adoption shifts employer demand for specific work activities using a standardized mapping of job responsibilities.
Authors
Dora Zhao, Lin Ai, Pranav Khadpe, Siddharth Suri, Scott Counts
Abstract
The growing adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) in the workplace has raised questions about how employer demand for different work activities is changing. We examine how the prevalence and content of work activities in online job postings change in association with activity-level measures of AI exposure, derived from Copilot and Claude usage. To enable systematic comparisons, we develop a pipeline that extracts the responsibilities from job advertisements and maps them onto O*NET's standardized taxonomy of Intermediate Work Activities (IWAs). We then apply this approach to 50,000 job advertisements from 33 firms between 2023 and 2025. From this analysis, we first find that explicit mentions of AI increased by 66%, although much of this growth occurs outside descriptions of the actual work activities associated with a job. Looking specifically at the advertised job responsibilities, activities with greater AI exposure tend to decline in advertised prevalence, but only mildly as a share of the total number of responsibilities. At the same time, more AI-exposed work activities increasingly are associated with explicitly AI-related responsibilities, suggesting that employers are looking to hire people who can perform these responsibilities with AI.