AI isn’t ‘killing’ jobs — it’s fueling a ‘new-collar’ era, LinkedIn says – PRWeek

CMO Jessica Jensen breaks down LinkedIn’s newly released ‘2025 Labor Market Report: Building a Future of Work That Works.’
by Julia Walker 14 January 2026
Is AI “killing” entry-level marketing jobs? Is content creation actually a “blossoming” sector, or just a loud one? Are “new collar” jobs the new blue collar jobs?
The “2025 Labor Market Report: Building a Future of Work That Works,” a new publication from LinkedIn released Wednesday, highlights both areas of growth and challenges within the current labor market.
With over 1.3 billion users, the networking platform leveraged its internal research group to “give an authoritative view of what we see on the economic and labor front ahead of Davos — a major convening of world leaders who care passionately about economic and labor moves,” LinkedIn’s CMO Jessica Jensen explained.
Among its main findings, the report announced a “new-collar era,” or an emerging workforce that blends tech skills with “distinctly human strengths,” based on the 1.3M AI-enabled jobs and 600K new data center jobs being created globally on LinkedIn this year.
While job hiring has slowed in the post-pandemic era, the increase in AI is not necessarily the primary reason for this stall. Around 52% of surveyed LinkedIn users say they’re job hunting in 2026, and 80% feel unprepared to find a new job — but “AI engineer” was the top U.S. role on LinkedIn for the second year in a row, and a growth in head of AI positions signals a “shift toward in-house strategic leadership” related to AI. 
Shifting to content creators, LinkedIn reported a 90% increase in LinkedIn members adding the “creator” title to their profiles between 2021 and the summer of 2025; and a 60% increase in members adding “founder” to their profiles year-over-year globally. The rise in content creator and entrepreneurship titles on LinkedIn aligns with the statistic that nearly four in 10 Gen Z professionals aim to work for themselves in the near future.
Campaign sat down with Jensen, to discuss the “new-collar era” surge of AI jobs, how LinkedIn is using AI to assist with hiring trends flagged in this year’s report and why smart marketers are integrating the “blossoming” sector of content creators into GEO strategies. Here are her breakdowns of the report’s biggest takeaways for marketers.
Jensen’s words have been edited for length and clarity. Click here to read LinkedIn’s “2025 Labor Market Report: Building a Future of Work That Works” report for a more detailed statistical breakdown.
‘Sluggish’ hiring doesn’t touch ‘new-collar’ AI jobs
“Global hiring is still sluggish, and that’s not new news. We’re seeing slower hiring, 20% down from pre-pandemic years. The professional labor worker segment is restless, consumers are concerned and there’s anxiety about the future of hiring, which is legitimate.
There are bright spots in emerging markets like India and UAE. Healthcare continues to bloom as a hiring area, which was also true last year, and AI certainly is ramping up. We’re seeing many new job descriptions and job types coming up — something we’re calling the ‘new-collar era’ of jobs.
There have been 1.3 million new AI-related roles created, including AI engineers and data annotators, and [in addition to] 600,000 new data center jobs. A lot of media coverage says AI is killing jobs — we do not see that. Yet, we are seeing new jobs come to the forefront. We’re always tracking how we can help workers develop new skills, and have added AI skill training for workers on our major learning platform LinkedIn Learning, which helps prepare people for today and tomorrow.”
LinkedIn’s job discovery AI tools and the surge in content creator jobs
“From the report — and also what we experience on a day-to-day basis as a large player in the hiring and talent market — we’re working to educate workers and companies about which areas of labor are growing and expanding, versus which are in some state of decline or turmoil.
We’re encouraging workers to take training and imagine new career opportunities, so we launched an AI job search. In the past, people could search for ‘finance manager, Los Angeles.’ But now, we’re encouraging users to input natural language into the search, like ‘I want to work outdoors, I’m an architect and I have a passion for the environment.’ That broadens the aperture of opportunities coming their way.
People need to reimagine and discover new paths — we’re seeing a blossoming of people becoming creators on LinkedIn, and being a creator is now a legitimate job pursuit and career. There are 200 million people making a living as creators, but five years ago, if a high school kid said they wanted to be a creator, their parents would faint. We’re also seeing a lot of entrepreneurship — the number of people adding ‘founder’ to their titles on LinkedIn has increased 60%.”
Why smart B2B marketers are integrating creators for geo strategy
“This point about the bloom of creators is important for marketers, and many marketers, particularly in the B2B realm, are familiar with the power of creators. The power of creators in the B2B realm is growing — and we see it as a major tide of activity on LinkedIn, but also a huge opportunity for smart B2B marketers to capture that brand affiliation and authentic storytelling through creators. 
Creators are a huge part of human content consumption now, and are important for marketers’ geo strategy. Post-SEO and LLM search means having that contribution through many more realms and authoritative voices — like creators on LinkedIn — is important. LinkedIn is either the first or second-most important place for content for LLM discovery, and marketers need to be thinking carefully about how they’re doing their LLM strategy, including creators.”
Is AI actually ‘killing’ marketing and media jobs?
“Building on the previous point that AI is ‘killing’ entry-level jobs, our data does not show that. Actually, the macro-economic environment over the past several years — particularly interest rates — is what has caused a lot of the uncertainty and slowness in the hiring market. 
There are a lot of marketers concerned about the impact of AI on marketing jobs and skills. We’re encouraging marketers to view AI tools as an engine to supercharge their work, but that human judgment and human storytelling are still what wins at the end of the day — and those won’t shrink in importance. In that same vein, media companies are saying AI is ‘killing jobs.’ In marketing, there’s a parallel that AI is going to help us do better marketing, but it’s not killing human judgment.”
Editor’s Note: This article’s headline was updated on Wednesday, January 14th, to reflect that the insight is not specific to marketers and creators. Corrections include: Hiring “concerns” was updated to hiring “trends” to reflect LinkedIn’s disposition; The new-collar era is based on over 1.3M AI-enabled jobs and 600K new data center jobs being created, rather than 600K new data center jobs.
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