Surprise! The Skills That Matter Most in an AI Economy Aren’t in Tech

Key Takeaways: 

• New data on skills from Indeed finds that business operations skills appear in 73% of U.S. job postings, outpacing every other skill category. These skills include customer service, administrative coordination, HR and project management.
• Despite dominating headlines and workforce conversations, technology skills, which include AI-related skills, appear in about 34% of all U.S. job postings. Employers that focus on AI fluency risk overlooking the skills that actually determine workplace performance at scale, like communication and leadership.
• As AI absorbs routine administrative work, uniquely human competencies like critical thinking, leadership and organizational judgment will become more visible and valuable.

Prevailing perceptions say AI is the most important factor shaping the future of work and that AI skills are quickly becoming a top hiring priority. But the reality is more nuanced and, depending upon your point of view, surprising. 

New Indeed research reveals that even in the advent of AI, human skills remain important.

“Essentially, the person using AI matters just as much as the AI itself,” says Laura Ullrich, Director of Economic Research at Indeed Hiring Lab. 

With this insight, Indeed’s recent findings could reframe the talent conversation entirely, and it directly impacts what your team should be screening for right now. In this article, Ullrich shares key takeaways from Skills Map by Indeed, a new Hiring Lab analysis of more than 3,000 individual skills, drawn from U.S. job postings on Indeed. Read on to learn more about the findings and what they mean for your workforce strategy.

Laura Ullrich, Director of Economic Research at Indeed Hiring Lab, offers a nuanced candidate question to understand how the applicant fits a role’s modern needs: "If you have 20% of your time freed up by AI, what would you do with the rest of it?"

The Numbers Behind the Most In-Demand Skill Category in the U.S. Labor Market

According to the new Hiring Lab analysis, business operations skills — the administrative, organizational and people-management fundamentals that keep organizations running — appear in nearly three-quarters of all U.S. job postings on Indeed. 

No other skill category comes close. 

Consistently and at scale, there’s a demand for business operations skills: customer service, administrative coordination, human resources management, corporate strategy and business project management. "These are really just core business skills," says Ullrich. "These are skills that might be taught in typical courses at the high school or college level."

A graph showing the average share of job postings mentioning at least one skill from a skill category in U.S. job postings from October 1, 2025, to December 31, 2025. Almost three-quarters of job postings mention business operations skills.

Within the broader category, customer service and administrative skills are the most in-demand subcategories, appearing in 37% and 36% of all postings, respectively. HR skills such as employee engagement, people management and organizational coordination appear in 27% of postings, including a majority of management job descriptions. 

To put it simply, business operations skills are the baseline for work today.

Why Is the AI Skills Conversation Misguiding Your Workforce Strategy?

This finding is especially important at a moment when AI is dominating conversations about workforce strategy, as employers deliberate over how to apply it, how to mediate its risks and which skills will survive the next technological wave. Some are even evaluating applicants by asking them to code with AI just to test their AI knowledge — even if the role doesn’t require coding in the day-to-day.

But that focus is diverting employers from where they should be investing time and effort to make real, impactful hiring decisions.

What's happening, Ullrich explains, is that many leaders are seeing how AI is transforming tech and expecting the same effect across the entire labor market. But according to the Indeed AI Tracker, which monitors the share of job postings on Indeed that mention artificial intelligence and AI-related keywords, only about 5% of U.S. job postings mention AI. In tech, that number rises: roles in IT systems and solutions and software development have AI in 20% or more job postings. But the tech sector makes up just 4% of U.S. employment.

Why Do Human Skills Determine Whether AI Works? 

The problem is that this information isn’t easy to act upon. The skills that are most important are also the hardest for employers to screen for during the hiring process or for workers to quickly pick up.

Anthropic's Economic Index helps explain why human skills remain so important in an AI economy. 

Anthropic found that high-performing AI users don’t require advanced tools or models. They just need the human capacity to iterate, collaborate and apply judgment to what the AI produces.  

In other words, the skills employers can't find are the same skills that determine whether AI works at all.

"There are skills that are very tangible," Ullrich explains. "Do you know how to code in Python? Do you know how to work an EKG machine? And then some skills are much more fluid and intangible, like leadership skills."

Business operations skills sit somewhere in between. Scheduling and calendar management can be taught in a training module. But other areas develop through feedback and practice over time, like having the judgment to know when to escalate a client issue or the instinct to read the room in a difficult meeting. These skills are harder to evaluate in an interview and easy to overlook when you're focused on technical requirements.

The risk of missing these skills is becoming more acute, according to Ullrich. "AI being able to assist with some of the more technical, mundane tasks is going to expose even more of the skills gaps in human-centric areas,” she says. “Who is creative? Who is a thought leader? Who is a critical thinker? Because those skills are so different from what AI can provide, they're going to be laid bare in a different way."

What it comes down to: “AI may be rapidly leveling the playing field for workers without degrees,” says Donna Bungard, Director of Accessibility at Indeed. For the first time, the skills most in demand require less than a high school diploma's worth of formal education. STARs, or workers Skilled Through Alternative Routes, may be better positioned for this labor market than the AI hype suggests.

However, keep in mind that these human skills will look different in different people. “Communication styles vary,” Bungard says. “Directness, formality and pacing differ across cultures and individuals, and none of those differences make someone a weaker communicator.”

How Should Employers Act on These Findings? 3 Strategic Moves

1. Audit your job descriptions because they may be outdated.

"As the world is changing so rapidly, talent leaders’ job descriptions may not be keeping up with the true skills that people need,” says Ullrich. If your postings haven't been updated in the past 12-18 months since generative AI's mainstream adoption, treat them as outdated by default and update them accordingly.

2. Invest in developing business operations skills in early-career and frontline workers. 

Business operations skills are hard to screen for in interviews and rarely arrive fully formed. Many entry-level workers have the technical aptitude you're looking for but often lack the operational literacy to apply it. They may not even realize they possess these skills. 

Training programs, mentorship and structured exposure to organizational decision-making expedite the learning process and give candidates the chance to demonstrate those intangible abilities.

3. Distinguish between skills AI can augment and skills AI cannot replace. 

AI is doing more and more with technical tasks like drafting, scheduling, analysis and coding. This frees up time and cognitive bandwidth, but only for workers who have the critical thinking and leadership capacity to use them well. 

Ullrich poses a nuanced candidate question: "If AI frees up 20% of your time, what would you do with the rest of it?" The answer to that tells you a lot about the person and how they may fit the modern needs of the role. Make sure your job descriptions and talent development programs reflect your expectations of AI-assisted work.

Building the Workforce That AI Can't Build for You

These recent findings should stop employers in their tracks. As Ullrich states, the difference isn't the tool. It's the person using it.

Anthropic’s report says that what separates top AI users is "fluency": they iterate more, they collaborate more and they bring judgment to what the AI produces. That's not a technical skill; it's craft and experience. That's exactly what Hiring Lab's data shows employers still can't find enough of.

These two reports are making the same argument from opposite directions. Anthropic demonstrates that human capability determines AI outcomes. The data shows that human skills remain the defining asset in the labor market. Together, they puncture the dominant narrative that AI is the variable that matters most. 

Indeed Hiring Lab is the only research team analyzing skill demand at this scale and depth through the millions of job postings on Indeed. Uncover more findings on Skills Map by Indeed.

Indeed provides this information as a courtesy to users of this site. Please note that we are not your recruiting or legal advisor, we are not responsible for the content of your job descriptions, and none of the information provided herein guarantees performance.

Indeed Hiring Lab Methodology

Data used in this analysis are based on the extraction of more than 3,000 skills — across 48 categories and 108 subcategories — from U.S. job postings on Indeed between October 1, 2025, and December 31, 2025 (Q4 2025). For extraction, a deep learning model, along with Indeed’s internal taxonomy and classification systems, was used, shaping how individual terms in job descriptions are grouped, labeled, and counted. Skills are aggregated across multiple hierarchical levels. The highest hierarchical level, i.e., the broadest skills categories, is shown in the bar chart titled “More than 70 percent of all US jobs mention at least one business operations skill.” 

Two metrics were analyzed: (i) skills mentions, i.e., the average daily share of job postings mentioning at least one skill from a certain skill category, and (ii) skills composition, i.e., the average daily share of a skill or skills category that makes up for the total number of skills mentioned within an occupation.
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