The SEEK AI Gauge
Summary
The demand for AI-related skills in job ads has more than tripled over the last decade. Despite this increase, the total number of ads asking for AI-related skills remains relatively small.
The number of job ads mentioning AI-related terms has been trending up again since early 2024.
Terms related to Machine Learning and Large Language Models feature in most AI-related ads. The prevalence of terms related to Agentic AI and AI Governance has jumped over the past year.
AI-related skills are mentioned most in job ads for IT roles but the share of Marketing & Communications roles featuring AI terms has grown sharply in recent years.
The new SEEK AI Gauge
The details in job ads on SEEK allow us to see what knowledge and skills hirers want from potential employees over time. By counting ads that include certain terms we can gauge how much demand there is for a particular set of skills.
The new SEEK AI Gauge aims to do this for AI-related knowledge and skills.
Artificial intelligence has evolved quickly in recent years and the demand for employees with AI-enabling skills has grown quickly as organisations look to unlock the promise of AI.*
The SEEK AI Gauge measures the change in this demand over time by counting the number of job ads on SEEK that include at least one AI-related term. Unlike aggregate job ads, AI-related ads stopped declining in 2023 and started growing again.
The fluctuation in the SEEK AI Gauge between 2020 and 2022 likely reflects the movements of the broader labour market, which is clearer to see when the number of AI-related ads is viewed as a share of total job ads over time. AI-related ads as a share of total job ads grew between 2016 and 2019.
During COVID, the AI-share of ads was little changed, before some growth in the post-COVID jobs boom. Interestingly, there was a decline in AI-related ads as a share of total in late 2022, around the time that ChatGPT was launched. In late 2023, the AI-share of ads started growing again.
The AI space is evolving quickly and Generative AI terms that didn’t appear in any job ads back in 2022 now appear in over 5% of AI-related ads. SEEK will add more terms as they emerge and become relevant, which means the SEEK AI Gauge will always reflect the latest trends in AI skill demand.
* Artificial Intelligence (AI) was first used as a term in the 1950s but it is only relatively recently that broader society has begun to pay attention to it outside of popular culture.
This is an excerpt from the SEEK AI Gauge insight.
Read the full insight here.
About Blair Chapman, PhD
Dr Blair Chapman is SEEK’s Senior Economist. Blair undertakes economic analysis and forecasting of the Australian and New Zealand economies and labour markets. He leverages SEEK’s data to develop unique insights about the economies SEEK operates in.
Blair’s economic analysis and forecasting skills have been honed across both private and public organisations including ANZ, Deloitte Access Economics, the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) and the
Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS). While at the RBA, he was their representative on the ABS’s Labour Statistics Advisory Group for several years.
Blair holds a PhD in Economics from Johns Hopkins University where his studies concentrated on macroeconomics and labour. He completed his undergraduate studies at Monash University, where he majored in Economics, Econometrics and Accounting.