High-paying jobs booming despite heavy AI exposure

The Bureau of Labour Statistics just put a number on something a lot of workers have been guessing at: which jobs AI touches the most, and whether that's actually shrinking hiring.

Out of the 831 jobs that were analysed, 206 were categorised under the “very high” impact of AI. Over 100 of these jobs have an annual median salary of $75,000 or higher even now and are expected to continue growing up until 2035.

Software developer jobs lead

There are 174,700 job openings predicted for software developers up until 2035, bringing their overall employment close to 1.9 million. The annual median salary already stands at $136,000.

BLS attributes the growth to continued build-out in AI, IoT, robotics and automation, plus rising demand for security software as more consumer devices and electric vehicles ship with connected systems.

BLS is explicit that "very high" AI exposure describes how much of a job's tasks an LLM can assist with, not whether the job itself is at risk.

Management analysts, data scientists and financial managers all sit in the same exposure bracket as software developers, and every one of them shows double-digit thousands of projected job growth over the same decade.

Human resources specialists made the very-high-exposure list too, a category most people wouldn't immediately associate with AI. The tasks driving that classification include résumé screening and applicant sorting, functions increasingly handled by AI tools before a human recruiter ever sees a candidate.

Both accountants and auditors and market research analysts exhibit such commonalities: repeated analytical activities being fed into an AI, along with a job that involves human judgement in analysing the results of AI's activities.

However, not all highly paid and rapidly growing jobs share such susceptibility to AI penetration. Physician assistants and optometrists were both among BLS jobs with a low degree of AI penetration despite rapid growth.