AI Skills Command Premium Salaries: Young Graduates Reap Benefits in Evolving Job Market

Why Companies Are Offering Young Workers With AI Skills 6-Figure Salaries

While the entry-level job market on the whole is still hurting, recent graduates who possess AI skills are finding sizable demand for their services. And starting salaries can reach up to hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. A new report by hiring firm Burtch Works finds that the starting salary of AI-skilled workers with zero to three years' of work experience now averages $131,139 -- a 12 percent jump from the year prior. Data scientists with the same level of limited experience are averaging $109,545 a year. Compensation levels vary slightly by industry, the report found, but the mean salary for all covered industries with zero to three years' experience was in the six-figure range. Health care/pharma is currently paying the most to AI-fluent workers, with a mean salary of $123,804. Consulting and tech are at a virtual tie at the bottom of the list, at roughly $104,500. "AI professionals still command a 9 to 13 percent cash premium over data scientists. The gap is widest where scarce [generative AI] expertise adds the most value," Burtch Works wrote in its report. "If you're seeking a job in AI and data science, quantify your genAI successes to demonstrate your skills in action [and] reference market data during salary negotiations." The current demand for AI knowledge is unprecedented. Job search site Indeed earlier this year said the number of postings for generative AI-related jobs had tripled between January 2024 and January 2025. That followed a 75X increase from April 2022 to April 2024. New college graduates are not just digital natives, they're often AI natives, having grown up with early versions of the technology and learning as it has evolved. That can make them a more natural fit for AI-themed jobs than more experienced workers, who may be more resistant to adopting the technology, in part because of fears it will make their jobs irrelevant. That has led to a bidding war for AI-savvy graduates. OpenAI is reportedly offering a base salary of $167,000, with more than $80,000 in stock options, to entry-level workers, bringing its average compensation to $248,000, according to Levels.fyi, a compensation-data provider. Scale AI reportedly has a total starting compensation package average of $185,000, and Databricks is offering $235,000. Within a couple of years, those numbers nearly double, per the Levels.fyi data. Several dozen users of Levels.fyi have claimed to have received offers of over $1 million from AI companies, with some of them having less than a decade of experience. At the same time, the number of AI job openings has soared. A study released in January by job tracking firm LinkUp and the University of Maryland found that from the beginning of 2018 to the end of 2024, the number of overall job openings was down 17 percent and total IT job openings fell by 27 percent. AI job openings, however, saw a 68 percent increase. Demand for AI skills has become so intense that many hiring managers say they would consider bringing aboard an inexperienced worker with AI expertise versus a more experienced employee. And 66 percent of those managers said they wouldn't hire someone who lacked AI skills, according to the 2024 Annual Work Trend Index by Microsoft and LinkedIn. The final deadline for the 2025 Inc. Best in Business Awards is Friday, September 12, at 11:59 p.m. PT. Apply now.

Why Businesses Are Hiring Gen-Zers Candidates With Scant Work Experience

There may finally be some good news for recent college grads and other Gen- Zers who say the challenge of finding work today is somewhere between daunting and impossible. Business experts and hiring data point to a tech-savvy path to employment that often doubles as a lucrative track for rapid career growth. By mastering the same artificial intelligence (AI) applications businesses are using to automate the work of entry-level positions, Gen-Z job hopefuls can use those skills to help employers develop and adopt the tech more effectively. "Learn all you can about AI, but learn more on how to implement them in companies," urged serial entrepreneur Mark Cuban on a recent TBPN tech podcast. "Learn to customize a model, walk into a company, show the benefits. That is every single job that's going to be available for kids coming out of school." Evidence indicates younger college grads doing just that are not only getting hired, but are also being paid remarkably well for their work. Many Gen-Zers, moreover, are landing those six-figure salaries with little to no experience beyond what they've learned about AI in classrooms or on their own, as illustrated by payroll data reported this week by the Wall Street Journal. It showed base salaries for people in AI-related, nonmanagerial positions -- and with zero to three years of work experience -- increased by around 12 percent from 2024 to this year. That was not only the largest hike in pay among all occupational categories, but its beneficiaries were also promoted to management positions at twice the rate of employees in other roles. Companies are hiring people with degrees or self-taught experience in machine-learning and AI for a range of needs. Those include building the tech from scratch, developing or adapting existing platforms, finding new ways to deploy applications across businesses, and helping reticent employees use them once integrated into workplaces. "We can't for the life of us get the more senior people to adopt (AI)," Ali Ghodsi, CEO of analytic software company Databricks told the Journal. The paper said the startup pays younger generative-AI research scientists with as little as two years work experience between $190,000 and $260,000, based on the immediate impact their knowledge can have on the business. "They're going to come in, and they're going to be all AI-native," Ghodsi said. "We definitely have people, quite junior people, that have big impact, and they're getting paid a lot... Under 25, you can be making a million." That demand for young people with AI skills is strong across the both tech sector and wider business world. As a result, starting salaries can reach $200,000 or more, often sweetened by equity stakes in the company. That's a far more welcoming employer reception than the majority of Gen-Zers trying to enter the workforce now receive. In June, the unemployment rate among recent college graduates increased to 4.8 percent, nearly a full percentage point above the national 4 percent average the same month. That jobless figure for new diploma holders was as high as 5.8 percent last February, and hovered between 6.1 and 7.5 percent over the last year for younger people with computer science degrees that didn't emphasize AI. That trend won't improve soon. Stanford University's Digital Economy Lab released a study this week showing the unemployment rate among people aged 22 to 25 whose jobs have been most affected by AI is 13 percent higher than employees whose work is less easily automated by the tech. "Our first key finding is that we uncover substantial declines in employment for early-career workers (ages 22-25) in occupations most exposed to AI, such as software developers and customer service representatives," said the paper titled "Canaries in the Coal Mine? Six Facts about the Recent Employment Effects of Artificial Intelligence." It summed up the change this way: "In contrast, employment trends for more experienced workers in the same occupations, and workers of all ages in less-exposed occupations such as nursing aides, have remained stable or continued to grow." The resulting grim employment outlook for the majority of recent college grads and other Gen-Zers seeking their first jobs is why Cuban and other business leaders urge all work hunters to spend every spare minute learning and improving their AI knowledge and skills. Doing so may be the key that unlocks the door to work for countless employers eager to adopt the tech, but need help setting their AI transformations in motion. "There are millions of companies that have one, five, 10, 50, 100, 500 people that aren't going to have AI budgets, that aren't going to have AI experts," Cuban told the podcast. "This is where kids get hired." The final deadline for the 2025 Inc. Best in Business Awards is Friday, September 12, at 11:59 p.m. PT. Apply now.

'Under 25, You Can Be Making a Million': Companies Are Paying Up to Seven Figures to Hire 'AI-Native' Recent College Graduates

AI training platform Scale AI pays base salaries of $200,000 a year for recent college graduates. Forget "digital native," the term that refers to those who began interacting with digital technology at a young age. "AI native" is the new label getting entry-level college graduates six- or seven-figure salaries right out of school -- and it's all about capitalizing on young workers' ability to use AI. According to a Tuesday report from The Wall Street Journal, though the unemployment rate for entry-level workers as a whole was 4.8% in June, higher than the 4% for all workers, companies are still hiring college graduates with AI experience. Data analytics firm Databricks, for example, is hiring three times as many recent college graduates this year than last year because of their ability to use AI. The company's CEO, Ali Ghodsi, told The Journal that some junior staff members having a "big impact" are getting paid a million dollars -- and they're under 25 years old. Related: How Much Does Apple Pay Its Employees? Here Are the Exact Salaries of Staff Jobs, Including Developers, Engineers, and Consultants. "They're going to be all AI-native," Ghodsi told the outlet, referring to the college graduate hires. "We definitely have people, quite junior people, [who] have a big impact, and they're getting paid a lot. Under 25, you can be making a million." Databricks' careers page shows that an entry-level AI research scientist working in New York City or San Francisco can make anywhere from $150,000 to $190,000 in base salary. Ghodsi isn't the only tech leader using the term "AI-native." Scale AI, an AI training service that received a $14.3 billion investment from Meta in June, pays employees right out of college salaries of $200,000 per year, according to The Journal. Scale AI's Head of People, Ashli Shiftan, told the outlet that Scale AI was "eager to hire AI-native professionals, and many of those candidates are early in their careers." Meanwhile, at Roblox, a virtual gaming platform, machine learning engineers with little to no experience can earn more than $200,000 annually, according to salary site Levels.fyi. Related: Here's How Much a Typical Microsoft Employee Makes in a Year The market for those with AI experience is divided into two categories, Stanford University Professor of Computer Science Jure Leskovec told The Journal. The first refers to some doctoral students who complete Ph.D. studies in machine learning and AI and receive large offers from companies without any experience. The other category encompasses programmers who use AI to become more effective, increasing their value on the job market. "It's almost like a next generation of a software engineer," Leskovec told the outlet.