Executive Summary

Assessing the artificial intelligence workforce is critical for developing effective training pipelines and policy. Assessment requires reliable measures of AI talent demand and supply. Most existing methodologies adopt an occupation- or skills-based approach to identify the AI workforce, both of which can overestimate the size of the AI workforce as they blur together three different labor markets: (1) people building AI systems, (2) people adopting AI tools in other roles, and (3) workers whose tasks are exposed to AI-enabled change. In this report, we apply a more precise definition of the AI development workforce to assess the U.S. demand and supply of people who design, train, fine-tune, scale, and deploy AI systems.

We define AI development jobs as roles that require specialized knowledge, skills, and abilities and directly contribute to the technical development of AI systems. Using this definition, we developed a machine learning (ML) classifier that identifies AI development roles in job postings data. We ran our classifier over a dataset of U.S. job postings from January 2010 to February 2026 to estimate the demand for AI development roles. We then estimated the size of the AI development workforce using a dataset of U.S. employee profiles. We found:

• Approximately 1.6 million AI development job postings in the United States since 2010, including 331,445 postings in 2025.
• Approximately 519,000 AI development workers in the United States as of March 2026.
• AI development roles are a small portion of the total U.S. workforce, accounting for less than 1% of both total labor demand and employment.
• AI development is concentrated in highly technical occupations, although among these occupations the proportion of roles that directly support AI development varies widely.

These estimates are substantially smaller than previous counts of the AI workforce because we disaggregated AI development roles from the broader workforce adopting AI tools in other roles and workers whose tasks are exposed to AI-enabled change. The technical workforce that develops AI systems is smaller and more specialized than previously understood. Our future publications and talent tracking tool, PATHWISE, will incorporate our AI development jobs definition and provide an empirical basis on which to develop workforce and education policy recommendations to bolster the AI workforce.