Demand for AI talent drives new employment opportunities, sectors

Artificial intelligence is emerging as a major driver of new employment opportunities, as growing demand for relevant talent boosts hiring activity and lifts pay levels across multiple sectors, a recent report showed.

From January to October, the number of AI-related job openings surged 543 percent year-on-year, with AI roles dominating the list of the most in-demand positions, according to a 2025 talent mobility report released by major recruitment platform Maimai.

Among the top 10 most in-demand technical jobs, algorithm engineers and large-model algorithm engineers ranked first and second, and were also the most sought-after roles for fresh graduates. In the top 10 non-technical roles, AI product managers came in third, the report showed.

High-paying positions are also increasingly concentrated in the AI sector. Among the top 20 jobs with monthly salaries exceeding 60,000 yuan ($8,526), AI-related technical roles made up the majority. The report also highlighted a clear "AI premium", with average pay for algorithm engineers for AI-generated content nearly 18 percent higher than that of general algorithm engineers, and AI product managers earning more than 20 percent above their traditional counterparts.

AI-related skills are also becoming a key requirement in recruitment. During the January-October period, 19.18 percent of newly posted jobs explicitly included keywords such as "AI" and "large models", up about 7 percentage points from the same period in 2024, the report showed.

"Talent standards in the AI era are shifting from selecting people with the highest potential ceilings to those with the strongest capability baselines," said Lin Fan, founder and CEO of Maimai. Lin added that AI-native talent should possess three core abilities: fast learning across new tools and domains, sound judgment to assess AI outputs, and the ability to ask precise and meaningful questions.

The report showed that AI tools have already become standard workplace equipment, with over 90 percent of professionals using them at work, up sharply from 69.99 percent in 2024. To be specific, DeepSeek and Doubao ranked first and second in usage rates, at 67.62 percent and 66.68 percent, respectively, while ChatGPT ranked third at 32.31 percent.

"AI will drive organizations through three stages of evolution: from 'everyone as a programmer', to 'everyone as a manager', and ultimately to 'everyone as a CEO'," he noted.

The senior executive added that in the first stage, at least 20 percent of workloads can be consistently handled by AI, with employees focusing on task decomposition and result optimization. In the second stage, AI will complete 60 to 70 percent of the work, and collaboration will increasingly take place between humans and intelligent agents. And in the final stage, more than 95 percent of work will be completed by AI, and professional services will become more platform — and cloud-based.

"More one-person companies are expected to emerge in this stage as firms purchase services on demand rather than maintaining full in-house teams," the executive said.

At the corporate level, sustained investment in AI has become a broad consensus, particularly among major industry players. The report found that 91 percent of companies with more than 10,000 employees have already applied AI, and 21.15 percent have achieved large-scale implementation in core businesses. ByteDance, Xiaohongshu (RedNote) and Ant Group topped the list for the number of newly created AI positions.

In terms of AI penetration rate in newly created positions, the top 20 companies were mainly concentrated in new energy vehicles, the internet and smart hardware. Xpeng ranked first with an AI penetration rate of 19.32 percent, followed by Ant Group at 17.87 percent and Huawei at 16.62 percent.

The AI-powered job market momentum is backed by a gradually recovering hiring market since June 2025, according to the report, with the overall number of newly posted jobs in the new-economy sectors from June to October exceeding the level of the same period last year.

New-economy industries refer to sectors that leverage technologies such as the internet, big data, cloud computing and AI to create new products, new business forms and new business models.

Salaries for newly created positions have also shown an upward trend. The average monthly pay in new-economy industries rose to 45,553 yuan during January–October this year, up from 42,874 yuan in the same period of 2024.

lijiaying@chinadaily.com.cn