Pursuing a 6-figure income? These 15 high-paying jobs didn’t exist a decade ago

Artificial intelligence is disrupting the current job market, leaving a trail of corporate layoffs and workers scrambling to determine what positions will be safe in the future. At the same time, AI tools are also creating a number of high-paying jobs that didn’t exist a decade ago, according to a new report from job search and career platform Ladders. The survey looked at data from professionals earning over $100,000 a year and mapped the top 15 six-figure jobs that it says are worth considering. “Most headlines frame AI as a wrecking ball aimed at our paychecks,” Marc Cenedella, Ladders’ CEO, tells Fast Company. “This study, however, shows [more than] 1.3 million new jobs have been created since the term ‘AI’ entered the mainstream vernacular, with many of those roles paying 56% above the rest of the pack.” These jobs exist across industries including medicine, marketing, technology, human resources, information technology (IT), and cybersecurity. Cenedella says the study’s real value is that it provides a map of the jobs that workers should invest their time in today, including a mix of new positions (chief listening officer, AI ethicist, and climate change analyst) as well as some obvious choices (SEO specialist, social media manager, and chief AI officer). “The best job bets all share one trait: A human is managing the machine, not racing against it,” Cenedella adds. AEO specialists and AI ethicists? Cenedella says there is currently a high demand for AEO specialists and AI ethicists. But what exactly do they do? As AI-generated summaries cut search in Google by 45% (even though the summaries are wrong 10% of the time), companies are adapting to the collapse in web traffic by investing in answer engine optimization (AEO) specialists, who make sure their original content appears in AI overviews or large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and Claude. These AEO specialists are the next generation o