Why Companies Are Offering Young Workers With AI Skills 6-Figure Salaries

While the entry-level job market on the whole is still hurting, recent graduates who possess AI skills are finding sizable demand for their services. And starting salaries can reach up to hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. A new report by hiring firm Burtch Works finds that the starting salary of AI-skilled workers with zero to three years’ of work experience now averages $131,139—a 12 percent jump from the year prior. Data scientists with the same level of limited experience are averaging $109,545 a year. Compensation levels vary slightly by industry, the report found, but the mean salary for all covered industries with zero to three years’ experience was in the six-figure range. Health care/pharma is currently paying the most to AI-fluent workers, with a mean salary of $123,804. Consulting and tech are at a virtual tie at the bottom of the list, at roughly $104,500. “AI professionals still command a 9 to 13 percent cash premium over data scientists. The gap is widest where scarce [generative AI] expertise adds the most value,” Burtch Works wrote in its report. “If you’re seeking a job in AI and data science, quantify your genAI successes to demonstrate your skills in action [and] reference market data during salary negotiations.” The current demand for AI knowledge is unprecedented. Job search site Indeed earlier this year said the number of postings for generative AI-related jobs had tripled between January 2024 and January 2025. That followed a 75X increase from April 2022 to April 2024. New college graduates are not just digital natives, they’re often AI natives, having grown up with early versions of the technology and learning as it has evolved. That can make them a more natural fit for AI-themed jobs than more experienced workers, who may be more resistant to adopting the technology, in part because of fears it will make their jobs irrelevant. That has led to a bidding war for AI-savvy graduates. OpenAI is reportedly offering a base salary of $167,000, with more than $80,000 in stock options, to entry-level workers, bringing its average compensation to $248,000, according to Levels.fyi, a compensation-data provider. Scale AI reportedly has a total starting compensation package average of $185,000, and Databricks is offering $235,000. Within a couple of years, those numbers nearly double, per the Levels.fyi data. Several dozen users of Levels.fyi have claimed to have received offers of over $1 million from AI companies, with some of them having less than a decade of experience. At the same time, the number of AI job openings has soared. A study released in January by job tracking firm LinkUp and the University of Maryland found that from the beginning of 2018 to the end of 2024, the number of overall job openings was down 17 percent and total IT job openings fell by 27 percent. AI job openings, however, saw a 68 percent increase. Demand for AI skills has become so intense that many hiring managers say they would consider bringing aboard an inexperienced worker with AI expertise versus a more experienced employee. And 66 percent of those managers said they wouldn’t hire someone who lacked AI skills, according to the 2024 Annual Work Trend Index by Microsoft and LinkedIn. BY CHRIS MORRIS @MORRISATLARGE