Overview

The Artificial Jobs Barometer Page (also known as PwC - Global Artificial Intelligence Barometer) is produced by PricewaterhouseCoopers, a global professional-services network. PwC combines large-scale job-posting data, company financial data, occupational data, and measures of artificial intelligence exposure to examine how artificial intelligence is associated with changes in jobs, skills, wages, headcount, and productivity. Since 2024, PwC has completed this report annually.

The Jobs Barometer is increasingly functioning as a labor-market measurement framework: repeated analysis of very large volumes of job advertisements, linked with occupational, skills, wage, productivity, and company data.

Methodology

The study analyzes job advertisements:

• In 2024, the analysis covered more than half a billion job advertisements across 15 countries.
• By 2025 it had expanded to nearly one billion job advertisements and company financial data across six continents.
• The 2026 study analyzed more than one billion job advertisement, across 27 countries.

The methodology has several interconnected parts and is a more substantial methodology than a survey:

• Job-posting analysis
  • Uses Lightcast job-advertisement data to examine the number of postings, skills requested, experience requirements, salaries, and changes over time. The full dataset covers more than one billion postings, although different analyses use different subsets of countries and years depending on data availability.
• Artificial intelligence occupational exposure
  • Updates the artificial intelligence exposure methodology originally developed by Felten and colleagues.
  • Uses the United States Department of Labor's O*NET abilities data and assesses how well 10 types of artificial intelligence applications can perform 52 human abilities.
  • Those relationships are combined with the importance of particular abilities within occupations to produce an Artificial Intelligence Occupational Exposure score from 0 to 1.
• Industry exposure
  • Occupational artificial intelligence exposure is combined with the occupational composition of industries to create an Artificial Intelligence Industry Exposure Index.
  • PwC emphasizes that a high exposure score means that artificial intelligence is relevant to more of the work performed in the sector; it does not mean that those jobs will necessarily be eliminated or automated.
• Skills change
  • Measures how the mix of skills appearing in job advertisements changes over time.
  • It uses a "net skill change" approach based on work by economists David Deming and Kadeem Noray, essentially adding up changes in the prevalence of individual skills within an occupation.
• Company outcomes
  • Combines its artificial intelligence industry exposure measure with Orbis company financial data.
  • Productivity is measured primarily as turnover per employee; headcount comes from company employment data; and wages are measured as staff costs per employee.
  • PwC compares companies in the highest and lowest artificial intelligence-exposure quartiles, generally using changes from 2018 through 2024/2025.
• Professionalised versus democratised jobs
  • Incorporates research by Teeselink and Carey (2026) to distinguish jobs in which artificial intelligence appears to shift work toward greater expertise ("professionalised") from jobs in which artificial intelligence enables less-expert workers to perform more of the work ("democratised").
  • It maps those classifications to Lightcast postings to compare job growth, skill demand, and advertised salaries.

Key Findings

The Jobs Barometer has documented a rapidly changing relationship among artificial intelligence, jobs, skills, wages, and productivity.

• 2024 report (inaugural)
  • Found that sectors more exposed to artificial intelligence were experiencing nearly five times greater labor-productivity growth than less-exposed sectors; jobs requiring artificial intelligence skills were growing faster than jobs overall and carried substantial wage premiums; and the skills requested by employers were changing 25 percent faster in occupations most exposed to artificial intelligence.
• 2025 report
  • Found that these patterns were strengthening: industries most able to use artificial intelligence experienced three times higher growth in revenue per employee, workers with artificial intelligence skills commanded an average 56 percent wage premium, and skills were changing 66 percent faster in the most artificial intelligence-exposed occupations.
• 2026 report
  • Identified further changes in how work itself is being redesigned.
  • Found a “two-track” labor market in which jobs being professionalized by artificial intelligence were growing faster than jobs being democratized by it; greater artificial intelligence exposure was associated with higher productivity, wages, and headcount among companies; and highly artificial intelligence-exposed entry-level jobs were increasingly requiring skills traditionally associated with more senior workers, including judgment, leadership, and strategic thinking.

Across the three reports, the Jobs Barometer provides an evolving method for using job postings and related workforce and company data to track how artificial intelligence is changing the demand for workers and skills.

PwC defines an early-career job as a posting requiring zero to two years of experience. It compares the skills requested in those jobs in 2019 versus 2025.

A skill is considered "new" to an occupation if it appears more than 10 times in entry-level postings in 2025 but five or fewer times in 2019. PwC then determines whether those new skills were previously associated mainly with experienced workers. More specifically, PwC defines a skill as traditionally senior when, in 2019, it appeared more than 50 times in experienced-worker postings but five or fewer times in entry-level postings within the relevant artificial intelligence-exposure group. An entry-level role can then be classified as "seniorised" when newly emerging skills in that role were previously concentrated among experienced workers.

Using that approach, PwC found that among the most artificial intelligence-exposed occupations, 52% of newly appearing skills in entry-level postings were traditionally senior-level skills, compared with only 7% in the least artificial intelligence-exposed occupations. The kinds of skills PwC highlights include judgment, leadership, creativity, and other human-intensive capabilities.

It should be noted: the headline seniorization finding is not based equally on all countries. One early-career analysis covers Canada, Singapore, the United Kingdom, and the United States, and PwC notes that approximately 73% of those postings are from the U.S.  The analysis comparing growth in "seniorised" versus "non-seniorised" entry-level roles in the highest artificial intelligence-exposure quartile is specifically a U.S.  analysis. PwC also cautions that these are associations and do not establish that artificial intelligence caused the employment changes.

Researchers are observing a shift in some artificial intelligence-exposed occupations in which employers increasingly expect early-career workers to demonstrate skills that historically were associated with more experienced workers.

Funding & Partners

PwC (PricewaterhouseCoopers) is one of the world's largest professional-services networks. Its member firms provide audit and assurance, tax, consulting/advisory, technology, workforce, and related business services to companies and governments. PwC is not a single multinational corporation; it is a network of legally separate member firms coordinated through PricewaterhouseCoopers International Limited.

The Jobs Barometer is produced by PwC.  The research uses PwC analysis of large-scale labor-market and company datasets, including Lightcast job-posting data and Orbis company data, as well as occupational and academic research.

Resources

PwC — Global Artificial Intelligence Jobs Barometer

PwC. (2024). 2024 Global Artificial Intelligence Jobs Barometer.
2024 report and findings

PwC. (2025). The Fearless Future: 2025 Global Artificial Intelligence Jobs Barometer.
2025 full report

PwC. (2026). 2026 Global Artificial Intelligence Jobs Barometer: Two Futures for Jobs in an Artificial Intelligence Era.
2026 Barometer webpage
2026 full report