AI Job Ads Promise More Than Higher Pay—but the Benefits Vary

Jobs asking for artificial intelligence skills increasingly advertise more than a salary advantage. In the preprint “Pay and Beyond: The Evolving Rewards for AI Skills,” Alejandra Castaneda, Matthew Bone and Fabian Stephany find that AI-related vacancies are more likely than comparable non-AI postings to mention remote work, inclusive workplace culture and parental leave.

Their study examines recruitment messages, not employees’ experiences. That distinction matters: advertising an inclusive environment does not demonstrate that a workplace is inclusive, and omitting a benefit does not establish that it is unavailable.

Reading nearly ten million advertisements

The researchers analyzed a random sample of nearly ten million U.S. online job postings from January 2018 through December 2025, drawn from Lightcast’s vacancy database. They classified a posting as AI-related if it mentioned at least one of 279 skills in Lightcast’s artificial intelligence and machine learning category. This captures jobs across industries rather than treating every technology-company vacancy as an AI role.

They searched descriptions for six categories: tuition assistance, paid leave, health and well-being initiatives, parental leave, inclusive culture and remote work, including hybrid arrangements. The well-being category was intended to capture offerings beyond conventional health insurance.

Keyword rules were refined through manual checks and comparisons with automated classifications. These checks support the method, but do not make it error-free: remote-work detection achieved 94% agreement with a benchmark model, with an F1 score—a measure combining precision and recall—of 0.805.

Statistical models accounted for combinations of industry, year, state, education, experience, advertised salary and occupation. Salary appeared in only about 36% of postings, so analyses involving pay cover a narrower, potentially unrepresentative sample.

A growing pay advantage, with selective extras

According to the authors, AI skills appeared in approximately 1–1.5% of postings before late 2022, rising to nearly 3.5% by the end of 2025. Their estimated adjusted wage premium approached 30% at the end of the period. This is an association between AI requirements and advertised pay, not a guaranteed raise from learning an AI skill.

The benefit advantage was selective. Remote work, inclusive culture and parental leave remained positively associated with AI postings after additional controls. Adding occupation controls noticeably reduced the remote-work association, but did not eliminate it.

Tuition assistance and general paid leave showed little evidence of an overall AI advantage. Parental leave therefore complicates a simple explanation that employers favor only inexpensive extras: the paper treats it as a costly entitlement, yet it still distinguished AI vacancies.

Inclusive-culture language requires particular care. Unlike a specified leave allowance, it need not commit an employer to a concrete provision. The authors interpret it mainly as a signal of organizational values.

Employer size changes the picture

The researchers separated small and medium-sized enterprises, larger employers and S&P 500 companies. Size was not measured directly through employee counts. Instead, they used employers’ posting counts in the 2018 sample, selecting a six-post cutoff after comparison with an AI-assisted classification of sampled employers. S&P 500 firms remained a separate group.

By the end of 2025, roughly 7% of S&P 500 vacancies requested AI skills, compared with around 3% among both other groups. However, the strongest increase in the AI wage premium occurred among employers classified as SMEs, where it approached 30%.

SMEs also showed the largest AI-related advantages in advertised remote work and parental leave. Larger non-S&P employers showed positive associations across all six benefit categories. Among S&P 500 firms, only inclusive-culture language showed an AI premium. That does not mean these companies offered fewer benefits overall: benefits may be standard across their jobs or described elsewhere.

Higher pay and benefits do not always travel together

The authors also examined whether each benefit accompanied a larger or smaller AI wage premium. Before 2022, higher pay and benefits tended to reinforce one another among S&P 500 firms, while several benefits were associated with smaller wage premia among SMEs.

Later, these differences narrowed. Complementarity weakened among S&P 500 firms, while some benefits became more complementary elsewhere. This was not a universal shift toward higher pay plus more perks: the year-by-year analysis found increasing substitution for most benefits toward the sample’s end, with remote work showing substitution across firm groups.

These statistical relationships do not demonstrate negotiated trade-offs or deliberate employer strategies. Firm productivity, job composition and other unobserved differences could contribute.

The preprint’s central finding is that AI-related recruitment packages differ beyond salary. It does not establish that ChatGPT’s release caused those differences, that employers successfully attracted scarce talent, or that workers received the advertised benefits. Pandemic-era workplace changes, shifting diversity language, imperfect size classifications and the uneven coverage of online vacancies all limit how broadly the results can be interpreted.