UMD-LinkUp AI Maps Transforms AI Job Tracking with Groundbreaking Approach

College Park, Md. – January 30, 2024 – UMD-LinkUp, a collaboration between the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland, LinkUp Job Market Data, and Outrigger Group, introduced the world's first tool for mapping the creation of jobs requiring artificial intelligence skills: UMD-LinkUp AI Maps.

AI Maps leverages LinkUp’s industry-leading job data to visualize the spread of jobs requiring skills in AI across the country – by sector, state and more granular geographic levels. The resulting interactive map allows users to track the creation of U.S.-based AI jobs each month; rank states by their share of those jobs; do a deeper dive across economic sectors, metropolitan areas, and counties; and determine a region’s AI Intensity: the ratio of its AI jobs to all other postings.

Redefining Accuracy

The handful of recent research papers on the subject have relied on keyword-based approaches to identify jobs requiring AI skills, resulting in up to 70% false positives. UMD-LinkUp AI Maps shifts the paradigm by utilizing a fine-tuned large language model (LLM) to enhance accuracy. This sophisticated approach filters AI jobs with an accuracy exceeding 90% when compared against manual checks by researchers.

“In short, we are using AI to track the dispersion of AI jobs,” says Anil K. Gupta, Michael Dingman Chair and professor of Strategy, Globalization and Entrepreneurship at the Robert H. Smith School of Business and co-lead of the project. “We are using highly specialized LLMs to assist with filtering AI jobs for an accurate and timely assessment of what constitutes an AI job.” Professor Siva Viswanathan, Professor Kunpeng Zhang and doctoral student Hanwen Shi, the other UMD researchers working on this project, envision this as a dynamic platform that can continue to generate interesting insights about the evolution of AI jobs in the US.

An analysis of initial findings is available in the From West to the Rest white paper, which shows AI jobs are on the upswing, despite a decline in IT jobs in general. The report pinpoints regions that have the highest share of AI jobs, including the Washington, D.C. region, thanks to the concentration of federal agencies and defense and aerospace contractors that have embraced the new technologies.

“UMD-LinkUp AI Maps exemplifies the type of industry- and policy-relevant research being done at the Smith School on the rapidly growing impact of AI on the U.S. economy,” says Prabhudev Konana, dean of the Smith School. “I am also delighted to note the emergence of the National Capital Region as the nation’s second biggest hub for the creation of AI jobs.”

Ascension of AI Skills

In 2023, AI job postings have grown, defying the overall decline in IT job postings since the start of pervasive layoffs in early 2022. While California continues to dominate AI postings as the epicenter of digital technologies, there is unmistakable evidence of accelerating geographic spread in AI postings over the last five years. The UMD-LinkUp map provides an advanced picture of the AI labor market as it develops.

Jon Norberg, Chief Strategy Officer at LinkUp and project co-lead, says AI Maps will be a vital tool in analyzing AI-powered economic shifts: “What’s most exciting is that every week brings new ideas for exploring how AI jobs are going to integrate into the economy and what skills and technologies are going to advance or decline as AI becomes integral to more employers.”

“The productivity enhancements created by AI will be profound, and knowing where those productive employees are located is going to be crucial to understanding how the U.S. economy is functioning,” says Evan Schnidman, co-founder and CEO of Outrigger Group and project partner.

Gupta, Norberg and Schnidman bring decades of expertise in academia, human capital management, and growth consulting to bear on the evolving implications of artificial intelligence on the labor economy. The research team also included Smith professors Siva Viswanathan and Kunpeng Zhang, as well as PhD student Hanwen Shi. 

UMD-LinkUp AI Maps is poised to define how the world visualizes and understands the emerging landscape of AI job creation. The tool combines academic rigor, highly accurate employment data, and expertise in AI methodologies to empower users as they navigate the question on everybody’s mind: how will AI change the world of work?

The Smith School

The Robert H. Smith School of Business is a global leader in management education and research. One of 12 colleges and schools at the University of Maryland at College Park, the school offers undergraduate, MS, MBA, PhD, and executive education programs. Several of the school's departments rank among the top 10 in the world for research in their respective fields.

LinkUp

LinkUp combines more than 20 years of experience in human capital management and employment data with proprietary technology that indexes millions of job listings daily directly from employer websites around the world. From this unique jobs dataset, LinkUp provides clients with actionable insights into the global labor market at the macroeconomic to individual company level or across themes, skills, products, and technologies.

Outrigger Group

Outrigger Group provides fractional executives to fast-growing startups and established businesses. Outrigger’s expert team of experienced executives and entrepreneurs helps companies accelerate growth through the most challenging phases of building a business, from inception through liquidity events.

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