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In April 2026, the Bipartisan Policy Center released the AI and Workforce Navigator, an online resource providing information for policymakers about how artificial intelligence is affecting American workers and jobs. One component of the Navigator, the Skills Data Dashboard, includes data from employment analytics firm Lightcast about the changing demand for AI skills in online job postings. A previous article looked at initial takeaways from the data.
This article looks closely at which industries are seeing the fastest growth in AI skills, which AI skills are rising most quickly in job postings, and what that means for policymakers. Key takeaways include:
Federal and state workforce systems were not built to track this kind of rapid, evolving cross-sector diffusion, or to help workers, educators, and training providers respond to it. BPC’s Commission on the American Workforce report provides a blueprint to build an agile, flexible, and resilient workforce system for the age of AI-driven change. The data from the Skills Dashboard makes the urgency for a coherent national talent strategy clear.
According to the Skills Data Dashboard, as of June 16, 2026, the eight industries with the fastest growth in demand for AI skills over the past year span both technology and professional services:
NOTE: Total Employment is preliminary data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages.
Four technology industries appear on this list, accounting for more than 200,000 job postings with AI skills over the past year. However, the demand for AI skills in professional services industries—including employment placement agencies, accountancy offices, commercial banks, and management consulting—is greater and growing at comparable or faster rates.
The specific skills driving demand in professional services industries are often specialized skills typically associated with tech roles and industries (see Lightcast’s skills taxonomy and definitions of specific AI skills).
In accountancy offices, the fastest-growing demand for AI skills is for Microsoft Copilot (+85% year-over-year), followed by prompt engineering (+76%). Demand for Machine Learning Operations (MLOps), the practice of managing and maintaining AI tools once deployed, has grown at 67%, retrieval-augmented generation at 64%, and generative AI at 60%. The growing demand for these skills tells a coherent story:
This is consistent with BPC’s recent examination of AI’s impact on public company auditors, which found that AI automates discrete tasks—data analysis, document review, pattern identification—while raising the value of judgment-intensive work AI cannot replicate, such as situational awareness, professional skepticism, and client communication.
Commercial banks, meanwhile, appear to be both deploying third-party AI tools and increasingly building new ones in-house. The fastest-growing skill in banking postings is competency with Hugging Face (+77%)—an open-source platform used to develop and fine-tune AI models—alongside large language modeling (+68%), generative AI (+67%), and machine learning algorithms (+64%). McKinsey’s Global Banking Annual Review 2025 found that AI has the potential to radically reshape banking operations globally, with early adopters gaining a lasting advantage over slow movers—and that AI could reduce banks’ aggregate cost base by 15% to 20%. The skills showing up in banking job postings in the United States are the workforce signal of that transformation.
Employment placement agencies have both the strongest growth (+67%) and largest volume, with 113,000 postings mentioning AI skills. Today, 61% of staffing firms themselves are using AI in processes such as candidate communication, job matching, screening, and sales outreach—up from 48% in 2024. As firms embed AI more deeply into these core processes, their need for workers who can build and manage those systems grows in parallel. The fastest-growing skills—AI broadly (+81%), prompt engineering (+72%), MLOps (+56%), and generative AI (+49%)—reflect that operational transformation.
Rising AI skill demand is no longer just a phenomenon limited to the technology sector. Accountants today are evaluating AI-generated audit outputs, bankers are both deploying and building AI tools, and staffing firms are embedding AI into core processes by which they source, screen, and match workers to jobs.
Research finds that three-quarters of all AI skill demand remains concentrated in just three occupational groups: computing and mathematics, business and finance, and management. AI is spreading rapidly, but it remains predominant in office-based jobs, suggesting we may still be in the early stages of a much wider diffusion across the economy into blue-collar and “new collar” roles. It is imperative to build an agile, flexible, and resilient workforce system for the age of AI-driven change—BPC’s Commission on the American Workforce report provides a blueprint to do this.
The AI Skills Dashboard updates daily; new indicators will be added quarterly through 2026.
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