In partnership with
Welcome back. In this edition, I break down AI salary ranges from LinkedIn’s new AI Talent Divide report. How does your team compare?
Share this newsletter with your favorite CFO, CHRO, and hiring manager.
A message from our sponsor:
Stop making AI decisions in the dark.
Leadership is asking: are we getting value from AI? Which tools are worth the spend? Where are we exposed? Right now, most teams have no idea.
Harmonic Security Usage Explorer changes that.
You get a complete picture of how your organization uses AI, automatically categorized into custom tasks and use cases.
You’ll see the projects being worked on, who’s using what tools, where AI investments are driving value, and where employees are engaging in risky behavior.
CIOs can rationalize spending and cut wasted licenses. CISOs can pinpoint where risk exists and neutralize it. AI committees can show exactly how their efforts are paying off.
THE RISING TIDE:
AI Jobs and Gender Gaps
Typical, non-AI job postings on LinkedIn have a listed base salary of $80K.
Typical AI job postings? $177K. More than double.
“The gap is large enough that even the low end of the typical AI salary range is higher than the high end of the typical non-AI salary range,” authors of the LinkedIn AI Talent Divide report write.
We’re talking — on one side — everyone from administrative assistants and nurses to CEOs; heads of AI, forward-deployed engineers, and machine learning engineers on the other.
“Even with that variation, the pattern is clear: most AI jobs pay more than most non-AI jobs,” the researchers write.
What the headline hides
AI roles are a bright spot in the labor market, with the number of job postings roughly doubling in recent years while overall hiring has fallen 30% since 2022.
But AI jobs make up just 1% of the workforce and are inaccessible to the vast majority of people due to education and skill requirements, Kory Kantenga, LinkedIn’s head of economics for the Americas, tells me.
Just look at the data:
-Over 90% of AI positions are held by workers with a bachelor’s degree or higher, compared to 82% of non-AI roles.
-Among the highest-paying AI jobs, 98% have at least a bachelor’s, close to 70% have a graduate degree, and about 20% have a doctorate.
-Compare that to all employed workers: In 2024, just 45% had a bachelor’s degree or higher, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
“You may need to consider going back to school if you’re looking to move up in AI leadership,” Kantenga says.
Here are the numbers
Typical pay of AI roles:
-Head of AI: $236K
-Director of AI: $229K
-Member of Technical Staff: $223K
-Applied AI: $201K
-FDE: $199K
-ML Engineer: $191K
-VP of AI: $177K
-Other AI occupations: $150K
-Data Annotator: $51K
Source: LinkedIn, The AI Talent Divide Aug. 2026. Data set: U.S. job postings, 2023–2026.
The big gender gap
Along with the broader report, LinkedIn's economics team also examined the global gender gap in AI jobs.
“At every stage of seniority, we see women dropping off," says Kantenga.
-They hold only 29% of entry-level AI jobs at AI companies.
-In C-suite AI roles at AI companies, women's share sits at 13%.
-In the U.S., the picture is no better. Women accounted for just 26% of new AI hires in 2025, compared to half in non-AI jobs.
Source: LinkedIn, The Triple Penalty, August 2026
Systemic obstacles, skepticism, and lower adoption of AI tools may all contribute to the divide.
The evolution of AI and its jobs will come down to collective social decisions, says Kantenga.
“It’s not a question of should we have these roles or not because they pay too much, but how do we enable people to join this labor force and be competitive.”
More on AI and jobs on Macro Talk:
Subscribe to Macro Talk to read the rest.
Become a paying subscriber of Macro Talk to get access to this post and other subscriber-only content.
Upgrade