What 180M Job Postings Reveal About AI’s Real Impact on Jobs in 2025

Analyzing 180M postings, the author finds an 8% overall decline in 2025, with AI’s impact concentrated rather than universal. Creative execution roles fall sharply while strategic creative, leadership, software engineering (overall), and customer service remain comparatively resilient; AI-focused engineering and infrastructure surge. Regulatory shifts, not AI, drove steep drops in compliance/sustainability, and influencer marketing stands out as a growing marketing niche.

Key Points

• Overall job postings fell 8% YoY in 2025, but declines and gains vary widely by role, revealing selective, not universal, AI impact.
• Creative execution roles (e.g., CG artists, writers, photographers) are in two-year decline, while creative leadership and decision-heavy design roles are more resilient.
• Regulatory pullbacks drove steep drops in compliance and sustainability jobs across seniority, while trade compliance rose amid tariff activity.
• AI-talent and infrastructure are surging: ML engineers (+40%) lead growth, alongside robotics, research/applied scientists, and data center engineers; leadership roles outperform managers and ICs.
• Software engineering demand is broadly steady (frontend softer), and customer service reps are not being mass-replaced by AI; influencer marketing is a bright spot within marketing.

Sentiment

The Hacker News discussion presents a mixed but generally engaged sentiment. While there is agreement with the article's conclusion about the resilience of software engineering jobs and the productivity gains from AI tools, there's also significant skepticism and questioning regarding the methodology (e.g., lack of absolute job numbers), the broader economic context (overall job market decline), and specific findings (e.g., security engineer decline). Some comments offer alternative explanations for trends or caution against oversimplifying AI's future impact, leading to a cautious and analytical, rather than uniformly agreeing, sentiment.

In Agreement

• Software engineering remains a secure job, and AI coding tools increase productivity rather than replace engineers, similar to how compilers made programmers more valuable.
• AI effectively serves as another programming language, making individuals who use it to create systems effectively 'software engineers', thus strengthening the demand for these roles.
• AI tools are already providing value by automating tasks like tax preparation, leading to cost savings and increased efficiency.
• Creative leadership roles, which emphasize strategy and decision-making, are more resilient to AI displacement, aligning with the article's finding that AI impacts execution-heavy tasks more.

Opposed

• The report's impact assessment is limited without absolute job quantities; percentage changes alone don't fully quantify the scale of job impact on '180M jobs'.
• The overall 8% job posting decline suggests an unusually volatile job market, which might render specific AI impact analyses less meaningful without broader context.
• The decline in security engineer postings is counter-intuitive to increased AI integration and security demands, possibly reflecting companies viewing security as an overhead reducible by AI, or difficulty in measuring AI security solutions.
• The long-term safety of software engineering jobs might be overstated; there are concerns about potential cascading layoffs if AI profitability expectations aren't met, or if AI rapidly evolves into a versatile agent.
• The definition of 'software engineer' is debated; simply using AI for coding doesn't automatically confer the title of a software engineer, which requires deeper skills and knowledge.
• Declines in roles like mobile engineers could be influenced by factors like increased outsourcing or a shift towards cross-platform development frameworks, rather than direct AI replacement.