Only about 1 in 5 job postings at AI-era companies is really an AI job
Only about 1 in 5 job postings at AI-era companies is really an AI job "AI" is everywhere in hiring right now: in company taglines, in job titles, in the first line of almost every careers page. So we measured how much
Only about 1 in 5 job postings at AI-era companies is really an AI job
"AI" is everywhere in hiring right now: in company taglines, in job titles, in the first line of almost every careers page. So we measured how much of the actual work involves AI.
On 22 September 2026, Level tracked 47,735 live job postings from 481 companies. Each one was scored from 0 to 100 on how central AI is to the daily work, then placed on a four-level scale.
What we found
| Level | What it means | Live jobs | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| Level 4 | Building AI systems is the job | 3,539 | 7.4% |
| Level 3 | The daily work is on or around AI systems | 6,574 | 13.8% |
| Level 2 | An ordinary role that requires AI tools | 3,275 | 6.9% |
| Level 1 | The work itself involves no AI | 34,347 | 72.0% |
Only 10,113 postings (21.2%) reach Level 3 or 4, the jobs where removing AI would leave the role hollow. Nearly three in four postings describe work where AI is absent, or only appears as scenery.
Among those Level 1 postings, sales (5,823), operations (2,139) and marketing (1,266) are the largest groups. Many of them sit at companies that describe themselves as AI companies.
Why it matters if you are job hunting
A company that markets itself as "AI-first" can still be hiring mostly for roles that never touch a model. The reverse is also true: a posting that never says "AI" but asks for retrieval pipelines or evaluation work can be a real AI role.
If you want to move into AI work, the job title and the company's homepage are weak signals. The posting itself is the better one: which tools it names, which skills it asks for, and how much of the described work depends on them.
You can browse the four levels and filter by role or remote work on jobsbylevel.com/levels.
Method
- Source: postings pulled directly from company applicant tracking systems every six hours. Expired postings are removed.
- Scoring: each posting gets a 0-100 score from the text of the posting only (AI tools named, skills requested, share of the work that depends on them), never from the company's marketing.
- Levels: fixed thresholds, not percentiles: 80+ is Level 4, 60-79 Level 3, 40-59 Level 2, below 40 Level 1.
- Date: counts read from the database on 22 September 2026.
- Limits: the level describes the posting, not the company or the person hired. A poorly written description can understate a role.
Full method: jobsbylevel.com/method
Originally published by Dev.to WebDev. Aggregated on AIWithGhost for educational purposes — full credit and traffic to the original publisher.