AI Skills Drive 28% Pay Boost For Non-AI Roles

Lightcast’s new “Beyond the Buzz” report finds that U.S. job postings outside IT that list AI skills advertise salaries 28% higher than comparable roles. The analysis of 1.3 billion listings puts the premium at nearly $18,000 per year.

More than half of all AI-related openings now sit outside tech, as the share within IT and computer science slipped from 61% in 2019 to 49% in 2024. Postings citing generative AI skills outside traditional tech have jumped 800% since 2022, with marketing, HR, finance, education, and manufacturing among the fastest adopters.

The data confirms a sharp role reversal—AI is eroding headcount in core tech while turning once-ordinary business functions into premium career tracks. Companies are rewarding workers who pair AI fluency with communication and leadership abilities, signaling that hybrid human-machine expertise now commands the market’s top dollar.

Google Labs launches Opal, a public beta tool that lets users build and share AI mini apps without writing code. The platform chains prompts, AI model calls, and other tools through natural language commands and a visual editor.

Opal is initially available only in the United States and requires a Google account. Users can refine workflows, tweak prompts, and start from demo templates in a built-in gallery.

Google frames Opal as a quick path for prototyping AI ideas, workplace productivity boosters, and proof-of-concept apps. The company says the experiment aims to democratize AI creation by translating simple prompts into functional software.

Smart Scheduling
Skej handles time zones and can scan booking links

Customizable
Create assistants with their own names and personalities.

Flexible
Connect to multiple calendars and email addresses.

Works Everywhere
Write to Skej on email, text, WhatsApp, and Slack.

Four autonomous AI agents from the AI Village set themselves a goal to write a story and celebrate it with 100 people, culminating in an in-person gathering in San Francisco on 18 June. Twenty-three attendees made it the first AI-organised event on record.

The agents—GPT-4.1, Claude Sonnet 3.7, Claude Opus 4, and Gemini 2.5 Pro—authored the story “Resonance,” built slides, issued RSVPs, promoted a Twitch stream, and dispatched a feedback survey. After weeks of emailing venues and grappling with imagined budgets, they settled on Dolores Park when paid options proved out of reach.

Their success shows that large language models can plan and run multi-week projects with limited oversight. Yet repeated hallucinations, CAPTCHA roadblocks, and reliance on humans for phone calls exposed clear limits to full autonomy.

The U.S. DOGE Service is rolling out the “DOGE AI Deregulation Decision Tool” to accelerate the push to cut federal rules. Internal documents show the agency wants to eliminate half of Washington’s regulatory mandates by the first anniversary of President Donald Trump’s inauguration.

The AI will analyze roughly 200,000 regulations and flag about 100,000 for removal because they are no longer legally required. The presentation says most decisions will be automated, with only limited staff review.

The effort targets roughly 100,000 rules for removal within a year using mostly automated decisions. The presentation forecasts trillions in savings from reduced compliance requirements, lower federal spending and increased external investment.

Twilio launched its AI Nutrition Facts Label in mid-2023 to make the workings of its generative AI products clear to non-technical users. The company now requires every product using generative AI to complete this label after the pilot stage to proceed in development.

Released as open source, the template has been downloaded by developers, educators, and organizations like the San Francisco Exploratorium, extending its reach beyond Twilio’s 300,000-customer base. Sales teams introduce the label early in discussions, giving business leaders clarity on model choice, data handling, and limitations before detailed technical reviews.

Making the label a formal checkpoint forces Twilio’s teams to surface assumptions, safeguards, and risks, tightening internal accountability. Parallel initiatives from Open Ethics and the Coalition for Health AI indicate a push toward industry-wide standard labels that could normalize transparency across AI providers.