AI Didn’t Take Your Job In 2024. What About 2025? Indeed’s Economist Weighs In

If 2025 is anything like the past few years for the job market, one thing is for certain: big changes are ahead.

In a few short years, the job market has seen massive upheavals, from the pandemic-era layoffs to the hiring frenzy that followed, the rise of work-from-home, to the surge of immigration, and the advent of large language model software marketed as “artificial intelligence.” And the year ahead could bring further changes.

Investopedia spoke with Cory Stahle, an economist at job search site Indeed, about the trends that will shape the job market in 2025. The interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

INVESTOPEDIA: What trends are you seeing in job postings that are not being picked up in the official surveys of the labor market?

CORY STAHLE: There’s been a lot of discussion about generative artificial intelligence and its impact on the labor market, but where we sit at Indeed, we’ve had kind of an interesting perspective.

We’re able to look at job postings that are asking for generative AI skills. The impact is still pretty minor on the labor market. We’re only seeing about 2 in every 1,000 jobs asking for Gen AI skills. There’s a lot of promise behind these tools, but the actual adoption of the technologies still has a long way to go.

We’ve seen a lot of interesting data on our platform around flexibility. We’ve seen a rise in employers taking more skills-based hiring approaches. We’ve seen fewer job postings requiring experience. We’ve seen fewer job postings requiring education, and we’ve also seen employers raising mentions of benefits and pay transparency in job postings as well.

INVESTOPEDIA: What do you think is driving that trend of increased flexibility?

CORY STAHLE: On one level, the thing that’s driving that trend of increased flexibility is worker demand for it.

We’ve seen that, especially for things like remote work, there are many workers who still would like hybrid or remote work options. And so, in a labor market where it still can be difficult to find workers, being able to provide hybrid or remote work options can give employers a leg up in the market.

There’s also the labor market side of things as well. Even though the labor market has cooled over the last couple of years, this labor market, especially in some areas, is still pretty tight.

We’ve seen knowledge worker jobs kind of fall off: your traditional office jobs, like software developing, marketing, those types of jobs. Employer demand has cooled pretty dramatically.

But in areas like construction and manufacturing and some of these more skilled labor jobs, we’ve seen that there’s still really strong employer demand and much more demand than we saw even before the pandemic.

INVESTOPEDIA: Going back to AI, it doesn’t sound like AI is going to take everyone’s job yet, but what about in the coming year? Is it increasing a lot? What do you see happening with that in 2025?

CORY STAHLE: It’s certainly increasing a lot. If we look back a couple of years ago, the number of job postings and mentions of this stuff was zero. This stuff just didn’t exist.

What we’ve seen is growth from zero. It is still pretty small, but when you start looking at it, it ends up being three or four times growth in the last couple years.

A lot of the job postings around Gen AI are really focused on roles that are creating or supporting the creation of that. We see what we call “mathematics” roles on Indeed—which consist of data scientists, data analysts—are one of the highest categories for using Gen AI. We also see it in software development and other tech jobs.

But we’re not seeing it in a lot of the other kind of less tech-centered roles yet. We’re not seeing a lot in accounting or sales, or any of those areas. As we move into 2025 I think we’re going to continue to see that surge and that growth continue.

Even if it were to triple in 2025, you would still only be seeing about six in every thousand postings. So there’s still big room to run for these Gen AI postings.

I imagine we’ll continue to see and hear a lot of discussion around it and continue to see a lot of growth. But I think for the job seeker, there’s no cause of concern, or fear that your job is going to be taken by an AI based on this data and some other research that we’ve done.