Base salaries for nonmanagerial workers in AI with zero to three years experience grew by around 12% from 2024 to 2025, the largest gain of any experience group, according to a new report by the AI staffing firm Burtch Works, which analyzed the compensation of thousands of AI and data-science candidates. The report also found that people with AI experience are being promoted to management roles roughly twice as fast as their counterparts in other technology fields. They’re jumping the ladder as a result of their skills and impact instead of their years on the job.
“There is a significant salary difference between a machine-learning engineer job and a software-engineer job,” says Anil K. Gupta, a professor at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business and co-lead of its AI job tracker.
Databricks, the data-analytics software company whose value has skyrocketed during the AI boom, plans to triple the number of people it hires right out of school this year, in part because of their familiarity with AI.