AI companies are using broader and more generic job titles

In short: AI companies are increasingly giving people broad, sometimes vague job titles, and the number of titles that mention AI has risen sharply since 2022.

What's going on

Some AI companies are leaning on more general job titles, like “AI Engineer,” “Chief AI Officer,” “Member of Technical Staff,” and “Forward Deployed.” These labels can cover many different kinds of work, a bit like calling several different jobs “staff” without saying what the person actually does.

A New York Times report says an analysis found use of a generic title rose by 50 percent in the last year among employees at Anthropic, OpenAI, and other AI companies. However, other widely cited datasets and summaries do not clearly show that exact 50 percent figure or match the wording precisely. What they do support is the bigger picture, that AI-related job titles are spreading quickly and are sometimes being used loosely.

For example, Indeed’s Hiring Lab has found that the number of U.S. professions with job postings that include “artificial intelligence” in the title has more than tripled since 2022. ZoomInfo has also reported that AI job titles have tripled since 2022, and that titles including “Generative AI” became far more common over roughly two years.

What to watch

If job titles keep getting broader, it may become harder for workers to compare roles across companies, and for employers to hire based on titles alone. Watch for companies to add clearer descriptions of what a role actually does, similar to how a restaurant menu tells you what is in a dish, not just its name.

Source: NYTimes