The SEEK AI Gauge

Summary

• The demand for AI-related skills in job ads has more than quadrupled over the last decade. Despite this increase, the total number of ads asking for AI-related skills remains relatively small.

• The number of job ads mentioning AI-related terms has been trending up again since mid 2024.

• Terms related to Machine Learning and Large Language Models feature in most AI-related ads. The prevalence of terms related to Agentic AI and AI Governance has jumped over the past year.

• AI-related skills are mentioned most in job ads for IT roles but the share of Marketing & Communications roles featuring AI terms has grown sharply in recent years.

The new SEEK AI Gauge

The details in job ads on SEEK allow us to see what knowledge and skills hirers want from potential employees over time. By counting ads that include certain terms we can gauge how much demand there is for a particular set of skills. The new SEEK AI Gauge aims to do this for AI-related knowledge and skills.

The number of AI-related ads increased relatively steadily between 2016 and late 2019 before they slowed with the onset of COVID-19. The number of AI ads then increased sharply in late 2020 and early 2021. However, as the New Zealand economy and labour market cooled post-COVID, the number of AI-related ads fell alongside the number of aggregate ads before they started to grow again in early 2024.

AI-related ads as a share of total job ads grew between 2016 and 2019. During COVID, the AI-share of ads was little changed, before some relatively sharp growth in the post-COVID jobs boom. However, as the New Zealand labour market slowed, the share of AI-related ads declined until 2023 when the decline in AI-related ads slowed but the aggregate number of ads continued to decline quickly. The total number of job ads began to grow slowly in late 2024, but the number of AI-related ads grew faster resulting in a sharp increase in the AI-share of ads over 2025.

The AI space is evolving quickly and Generative AI terms that didn’t appear in any job ads back in 2022 now appear in around 4% of AI-related ads. SEEK will add more terms as they emerge and become relevant, which means the SEEK AI Gauge will always reflect the latest trends in AI skill demand.

This is an excerpt from The SEEK AU Gauge Insight.

Read the full insight here.  

About Blair Chapman, PhD  

Dr Blair Chapman is SEEK’s Senior Economist. Blair undertakes economic analysis and forecasting of the Australian and New Zealand economies and labour markets. He leverages SEEK’s data to develop unique insights about the economies SEEK operates in. 

Blair’s economic analysis and forecasting skills have been honed across both private and public organisations including ANZ, Deloitte Access Economics, the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) and the

Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS). While at the RBA, he was their representative on the ABS’s Labour Statistics Advisory Group for several years.

Blair holds a PhD in Economics from Johns Hopkins University where his studies concentrated on macroeconomics and labour. He completed his undergraduate studies at Monash University, where he majored in Economics, Econometrics and Accounting.