If you’re searching for AI jobs, you are more than likely looking in the wrong places.
Most professionals hear “AI job” and immediately envision an AI researcher, data scientist, or machine learning engineer facing multiple monitors and screens, writing code, and building something futuristic.
Well, that's an incomplete picture of the reality of the AI job market.
In 2025, global job postings requiring AI skills jumped eight times faster than the overall job market, at 68.9% versus overall job postings growing 8.6%, according to PwC’s 2026 Global AI Jobs Barometer.
Continue Reading with a Forbes Subscription
Our in-article subscription offer currently relies on technologies that are not active under your current cookie settings, so we're unable to display it here. We're working to improve this experience. If you’d like to subscribe to Forbes in the meantime, you may adjust your cookie preferences to do so. You can adjust these back after subscribing by using the Cookie Preferences link in our footer.
Employers upped their salary premium, paying workers up to 62% higher for their AI skills than they would have paid for the same role without AI skills.
So what’s the obvious career advice?
Learn Python? Pursue a job at OpenAI or Anthropic? Join an AI start-up in New York or San Francisco, perhaps?
Following that path could cause you to overlook the more immediate opportunity.
What’s fascinating is that some of the biggest opportunities are actually emerging inside these industries:
Why?
Because, as Dan Priest, PwC’s Chief AI Officer told me in our podcast interview right after the Barometer was published, these industries are hungry for professionals who can use AI to:
And the amazing thing is that these opportunities are highly accessible because you don’t need to be an engineer or know how to write code. All you need is your business knowledge, sound judgement, and AI fluency, especially as relates to workflows and agentic AI.
Where These No-Code, High-Paying AI Jobs Are EmergingLet’s start with healthcare.
Healthcare is an industry that, by nature, holds enormous volumes of clinical and patient data to run its operations effectively.
For this reason, healthcare is an industry that stands to benefit most significantly from AI optimization. AI-skilled professionals can use artificial intelligence to reduce administrative and clinical bottlenecks such as those that occur when referrals are made. They can personalize communication and patient customer experiences, improve diagnostics, and support patient plans and clinical decision making.
Examples of roles that can be positively impacted by an AI salary boost and growth in demand include:
Currently, medical and health services managers earn about $120,000 on average in the U.S., per data from Salary.com, so can you imagine what the salary potential could be with wage premiums rising up to 62%?
Professional services firms are trusted for their in-depth industry expertise, recommendations, analysis, insight, and most importantly, judgment.
This means that while they cannot be replaced by AI entirely due to the need for human judgment and credibility, AI empowers consultants, analysts, and project teams to create, update, and review larger quantities of information, model and prototype (almost without cost) potential scenarios and solutions for their clients, and create personalized and higher-quality client deliverables within stricter timeframes.
For example, when I was at SXSW London this year, Bird & Bird CEO Christian Bartsch noted that for the entirety of his career, the most tech that would be used within a law firm was Excel and Microsoft Word.
But now, he admitted, it's impossible to fulfill your ethical obligations as a lawyer without using AI to fact-check your work first. Rather than using AI to replace a lawyer's judgment or to invent cases that don't exist, AI can help legal teams ensure that their documentation is airtight and speed up their legal research.
Some other roles that stand to benefit from AI as far as salary and demand are concerned, include:
Priest told me that in the same way e-commerce transformed the Millennial era in enabling consumers to discover and compare and purchase products more efficiently from the comfort of their homes, agentic commerce and agentic AI is transforming the market.
He explained:
“The way they buy, and the way they shop and have relationships with products is fundamentally changing.”
For example, ChatGPT can connect with shopping apps for a variety of commerce scenarios, using plugins such as Etsy, Autotrader, Getir, Rightmove, DealPilot, and ProductHunt. You can use it to book flights, plan your vacation, compare prices through a conversation, ask questions about a product or a seller's history, and find the best value deals.
Customers find that this conversational method of conducting their online shopping is highly attractive and builds trust.
And of course, with ChatGPT introducing in-conversation ads, this is definitely set to change the e-commerce market.
Within a consumer-facing industry, the roles that will see the greatest positive impact from AI on salary and demand include:
Within these roles, you might use AI to develop personalized, tailored, bespoke customer journeys, predict trends, analyze consumer sentiment, and redesign customer shopping experiences entirely using AI assistance.
Beyond these immediate use cases, AI also forces e-commerce and marketing professionals to recreate their strategy on how they appear online, not just on their website or for Google search, but in AI search results as well.
What AI Jobs Should You Be Focusing On Now?So if you’re looking for your next AI job to have “AI,” “ML,” or “engineer” in the title, and you have a non-technical background, you’re going to be waiting for a long time, because that is not where the core value lies.
Engineers and scientists build the AI infrastructure.
But ultimately, how effective AI implementation is in generating growth and productivity comes down to professionals who have the domain expertise, and possess the uncanny ability to connect the dots between AI and real-world workplace scenarios.
Employers are now paying a premium for experts who can combine their industry expertise with AI-powered processes and fluency.
And yes, that could mean writing and debugging code; but it can also mean creating a new customer experience, vibe coding a tool for you and your team to work smarter and more efficiently, integrating an AI agent into your customer experience, or flipping your current outdated workflow on its head, and reimagining it with AI tools to reduce costs in your organization.
That is where you gain your greatest flex.
Use our AI to tailor your resume for this AI Jobs Surged 8 Times Faster Than The Job Market. You Don’t Need To Code position at Forbes.