Thirteen months ago, when ChatGPT pushed generative AI into the business (and recruitment) spotlight, it seemed pretty obvious that technology would change the way we work forever. Bots were going to replace recruiters, and copywriters would need to adapt to the skilled use of technology or else disappear altogether.
While things have certainly changed a bit, it’s worth asking—if some folks are still working pretty much the same as they did last year, and other jobs are gone entirely, what has GenAI changed, and what can we expect in the near future?
One report coming out from the folks at Indeed gives us a hint as to how AI has changed the work and the job market (so far).
Their Hiring Lab report from last February 2025 says that just 0.28% of job postings in Canada and 0.24% in the US mention Generative AI.
This is a surprising finding given that AI was supposed to revolutionize work in record time—wasn’t AI supposed to be putting the productivity of marketers, programmers, and data analyst through the roof? Shouldn’t the skilled use of AI be a job requirement for many professions by now?
Today we’re tackling this question in detail—what AI has and hasn’t changed for workers, job requirements, and businesses in general.
AI has eliminated many jobs but hasn’t had a huge impact on how we work
As with any new technology, especially in the age of social media, information spreads like wildfire.
We’ve seen all sorts of projects and promises that are supposed to change recruitment forever—AI text screeners, AI voice recruiters, resume parsers and rankers, etc. Same goes for other white collar jobs in writing, design, and data/IT.
So far, it looks like AI is better at replacing workplace functions rather than augmenting them—either AI can do the whole job, or not do it at all—with very little in between. Yes there are plenty of folks who use AI on a day-to-day basis, but it appears to be working as one tool among many, rather than being a critical part of roles.
The fact that many occupations have seemingly dodged the initial wave of AI goes hand in hand with last year’s report from Goldman Sachs that companies are having a hard time monetizing AI—that AI isn’t having the impacts we thought it would.
That’s also clear in the data from Indeed—if AI isn’t showing up in job postings, that means employers aren’t looking for those skills. And if they’re not looking for those skills, we can pretty safely assume that people aren’t using them—at least not in any trainable, measurable, or qualified way.
AI may be eliminating some jobs rather quietly
As Raise’s IT recruitment team noticed, AI has changed jobs for programmers and developers by reducing the need for “coders” whose work can be effectively replaced by GenAI.
This might also be true for small or medium-sized business. Let’s say a fictional recruitment company “Tinyhires Inc.” decides they can do socials with AI rather than hire someone—an existing team member learns how to customize prompts that make credible looking social posts in an hour or two a week.
You wouldn’t put “AI prompting skills” in a job description because it’s pretty rudimentary and probably in line with what that resource already does—after all, the person in the role right now learned how to do it on the fly—presumably, so too could their eventual replacement.
This is one of the trickier parts of measuring AI adoption—the actual skills involved (search queries, analysis, editing, fact-checking) are already common to workplaces. So when AI replaces or changes a role, we don’t necessarily see it change the definition or presence of that role in the job marketplace.
So while we might not “see” the impacts of AI in the workforce in an obvious way (outside of the specific roles it has already or will soon replace), there could very well be more subtle changes to the workforce happening now—something that isn’t captured by the Indeed survey of job skills, or even by a quick look around the job market.
We haven’t seen all the impacts that AI is going to have
Sometimes change is incredibly fast—but more commonly it is slow.
Business leaders aren’t machines (yet)—and they aren’t likely to slash jobs on a whim, or to restructure the roles and responsibilities of entire teams of people without good reason. Particularly because ChatGPT was very accessible from the get-go, employers have the luxury of waiting and seeing how GenAI is going to change their workforce—it is as if we were given the “freeware” version of AI to see how we want to use it (obviously, this also gives tech corps time to scrape our use of AI into data, and determine how best to monetize it).
In terms of AI adoption, this probably means small(ish) pilot investments in companies and platforms that look promising. Maybe if those are very successful during, staff working around and with those technologies will train up on the platforms and truly integrate AI into their workflows. At that point we might start seeing more “AI” mentions in job postings.
Another thing to consider is the plurality of platforms available now—take recruitment for example. Should you use Perfect or Apriora to modernize your recruitment process?
Until a smaller handful of technologies triumph, it’s probably too hard to ask for skills in specific platforms or technologies from prospective employees. After all—do you ask for “word processing” in a job description or do you use “Microsoft Word”?
Until the AI product market settles down and figures itself out, we might not see a strong showing of AI skills in job requirements or the workforce
…or maybe something breaks next week and changes everything forever. Who knows!
