According to Inc, LinkedIn’s 2024 “Jobs on the Rise” report reveals a fascinating trend. The fastest-growing job in the U.S. is AI Engineer, followed by AI Consultant/Strategist. Data Annotator comes in as the fourth fastest-growing role. The report highlights that these AI-centric jobs are deeply reliant on human skills like judgment, planning, and quality control. Outside of tech, roles like New Home Sales Specialist and Healthcare Reimbursement Specialist are also surging. These positions depend on emotional intelligence and personal credibility that clients still demand from people.
The Human in the Machine
Here’s the thing: this report basically pulls back the curtain on the current state of AI. We’re not in an age of autonomous systems building themselves. Not even close. The #1 job, AI Engineer, isn’t about writing code that runs on its own. It’s about making constant, human-led decisions. What data do we use? How should the model learn? What’s an acceptable error? These are judgment calls, not algorithmic ones.
And look at the #2 role, AI Consultant. This isn’t a coding job. It’s about interpretation, strategy, and organizational insight. You need to understand a business, its people, and its problems. A machine can’t do that. It needs a human to translate messy reality into a plan a system can attempt to address. So the boom isn’t in “AI” as some abstract force. It’s in the human translators who bridge the gap between the technology and the real world.
The Foundation is Human Too
This gets even more interesting with the #4 job: Data Annotator. This is the foundational work. These are the people labeling images, reviewing text, and categorizing data that trains every major AI model. LinkedIn notes many come from editorial and research backgrounds. Why? Because they have judgment, an eye for nuance, and a sense of quality control.
Think about it. If you’re training a medical AI, you need annotators who can spot subtle details in a scan. That’s expertise. That’s human context. Without this layer of human judgment literally baked into the training data, the models are useless, or worse, dangerously flawed. So the AI boom is creating a whole new class of “knowledge workers” who are essential precisely because they aren’t machines.
Beyond Tech, It’s All About EQ
Now, the report’s real kicker is outside the tech sector. The fastest-growing jobs there are specialists in sales, healthcare reimbursement, fundraising, and advertising. What do they all have in common? Emotional intelligence, credibility, and care. You don’t want an AI to guide you through buying a home or navigating a complex health insurance claim. You want a person you trust.
This trend tells us something critical about the limits of automation, at least for now. For all the talk of AI replacing jobs, the jobs growing the fastest are intensely human. They require empathy, relationship-building, and nuanced understanding. Machines are terrible at that. So maybe the future isn’t about humans versus AI. It’s about humans *using* AI, with our unique skills directing the technology. That’s a future where the most valuable skills might just be the ones we’ve had all along.
