📉 The Job Market Is Slowing — AI Hiring Isn’t

📬 A focused Sunday briefing to complement your regular issues.

🟣 Sunday Special - Your AI Events, Learning, and Career Briefing

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Each Sunday, we cut through the noise to surface the AI signals that actually matter for builders, operators, and career-minded professionals. This week’s edition looks at how AI is quietly reshaping work: hiring stays flat while AI mentions surge, AI fluency becomes a baseline skill, and incumbents race to rebuild search around personal context.

Inside this issue:

Featured Spotlight: AI mentions in job postings hit record highs—even as hiring stalls
New This Week: AI fluency demand surges 7× across STEM and non-STEM roles
Product Update: Yahoo launches Scout, a personalized AI answer engine

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Featured Spotlight

AI mentions in job postings hit record highs, even as hiring stalls

Indeed's January 2026 labor market update shows a striking divergence: overall hiring remains flat, but jobs mentioning AI are surging to all‑time highs. AI‑related terms now appear in 4.2% of all U.S. job postings, with demand especially strong in:

• Data & Analytics → nearly 45% of postings mention AI

• Marketing → ~15%

• Human Resources → ~9%

• General U.S. job market → postings only 5.5% above 2020 levels, but AI‑skill demand is accelerating

Partner break

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AI Events

 📌 AI & Big Data Expo Global | London | Feb 4 – 5
A major in-person expo bringing together enterprise AI, ML, and data leaders to explore real-world use cases, ethical AI, analytics, and scalable AI adoption across industries.

📌 AI Revolution Summit | Singapore | Feb 5
A high-level summit featuring AI leaders, innovators, and policymakers discussing the latest breakthroughs and their impact on business, society, and economic growth.

📌 Building Agentic AI: The ADK & Cloud Run Advantage | Virtual | Feb 5
A hands-on Google Cloud session on designing and deploying agentic AI using the Agent Development Kit (ADK) and Cloud Run, with real-world architectures and best practices.

New This Week

AI fluency demand surged 7× in just two years

New McKinsey data shows demand for AI fluency—the ability to use and manage AI tools has risen 7× from 2023 to 2025. AI skills now appear in 5% of all U.S. job postings, across both STEM and non‑STEM roles, signaling that AI capability is becoming a baseline expectation at work.

🔗McKinsey’s Skill Change Index: http://mck.co/aiskills

Why it matters

• AI fluency is becoming a core workforce skill

• Demand is rising beyond engineering

• Applied AI skills now matter as much as technical ones

What 100K+ Engineers Read to Stay Ahead

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AI Learning Opportunities

🎓 Agentic AI Foundations
A hands-on foundational course covering what makes AI agentic and how to design basic autonomous systems using AWS tools like Amazon Q and Bedrock Agents.

🎓 Agent Skills with Anthropic
Learn how to build reusable skills and expert workflows to extend AI agents like Claude for coding, data analysis, and research tasks.

🎓 Create Agents in Microsoft Copilot Studio
A practical course on designing and deploying custom Copilot agents using Copilot Studio, Power Automate, and enterprise integrations.

🎓 Claude with Google Cloud’s Vertex AI
Learn how to deploy and integrate Claude on Vertex AI with multi-turn conversations, tool use, and retrieval-augmented workflows.

 Product Update

Yahoo launches Scout, a personalized AI answer engine

Yahoo has launched Scout, an AI answer engine in US beta that delivers direct, task‑focused answers across shopping, stock checks, planning, and fact‑finding. Scout taps into Yahoo’s deep data assets - hundreds of millions of user profiles, a billion‑node entity graph, Claude as the primary model, and Bing’s grounding API for cited results offering a more personalized alternative to generic conversational search.

​Why it matters

• Strengthens this week’s theme of “Search gets personal” with a major entrant beyond Google

• Shows how incumbents with rich user data are racing to build AI layers on top

• Offers a blueprint for founders building vertical answer engines in finance, health, travel, and more

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AI Career Opportunities

👩‍💻 AI Software Engineer | Microsoft | Hybrid, US
Build and scale intelligent systems across Microsoft’s AI platform, working on core infrastructure and AI-powered features at global scale.

👩‍💻 AI Full Stack Engineer | Remote, USA
Develop end-to-end AI-driven products, combining modern front-end experiences with LLM-powered backend systems.

👩‍💻 Product Designer – ChatGPT | San Francisco
Shape the future of ChatGPT by designing intuitive, high-impact user experiences in collaboration with engineering and research teams.

👩‍💻 Member of Technical Staff – Interpretability | xAI | Palo Alto, CA
Research and build interpretability tools to better understand and guide large AI systems for reliability and societal benefit.

👩‍💻 AI Applied Scientist II | Microsoft | Hybrid, US
Work on advanced AI research and model evaluation, contributing to large-scale intelligent systems across Microsoft’s AI ecosystem

✨ Final Note

Keep building. Keep exploring.
One new idea every week and the future gets more interesting.

If this week’s issue helped you, forward it to one person who’d love faster smarter workflows.