The Jobs AI Is Actually Creating (Not Just Cutting)

Yesterday we talked about how loosely companies are using "AI" as a reason for layoffs. Today we want to put the other half of the picture next to it, because it's just as real and it gets a lot less attention.

LinkedIn's Economic Graph has reported that AI has already added 1.3 million jobs, based on actual platform data rather than a projection or a survey. LinkedIn has also published its list of fastest-growing roles for 2026, and it keeps getting reshared because it complicates the doom narrative in a useful way. Jobs aren't just disappearing. New categories of work are showing up fast enough that hiring managers are struggling to fill them.

We're not saying this to argue that AI is net positive or net negative for employment. Anyone who tells you they know that for certain this early is guessing. What we'd rather point out is something more useful for the leaders and sales teams we work with day to day: the two stories, jobs lost and jobs created, are happening in the same market at the same time, often inside the same companies. A business can be cutting a support function while simultaneously scrambling to hire for a role that didn't exist eighteen months ago. That's not a contradiction. That's just what a fast transition looks like from the inside.

For anyone building a marketing or creative team right now, this matters more than it might seem. The skills worth investing in aren't necessarily the ones getting automated away, and they're often not the flashiest "AI job" either. A lot of the fastest-growing roles are ones where AI is a tool the person uses, not a replacement for the person. That's a meaningfully different hiring problem than "train everyone to prompt a chatbot and call it done."

If you're making headcount or training decisions this quarter, the honest answer is that the labor market is more nuanced than either the panic or the hype suggests. Look at what's actually growing on your own team's roadmap, not just what's trending on LinkedIn this week, ours included.