AI talent comes at a 30% salary premium: 'If you try to play catch up later, this is going to cost you even more'

AI skills are in demand, and HR will need to fork over higher salaries to recruit this talent.

Adding AI skills to job descriptions could cost employers 28% more in annual compensation, a recent report from research firm Lightcast found. AI-related skills can include expertise with large language models (LLMs), like ChatGPT and Microsoft CoPilot, as well as prompt engineering, text summarization, and more.

A Lightcast analysis of over 1.3 billion job postings in 2024 found roles advertising at least one AI or generative AI skill offered $18,000 more in annual compensation on average than those that did not. Some 51% of these AI roles were not in tech-related industries, up from 44% in 2022.

“AI is becoming more and more pervasive throughout all of the job descriptions that we’re s