The fastest-growing careers — and how exposed each one is to AI

What the two datasets say about each other

Our AI-exposure ratings are built without reference to the federal projections. Across the 72 careers we rate and BLS also tracks, they line up:

An alignment, not a cause — and the most-exposed group is also the lower-paid, more clerical end of the list, which is its own explanation. Read it as two independent measures pointing the same way, not as proof that one drives the other.

The 10 fastest-growing, 2024–2034

1. 1.Nurse practitioner🟢 Lightly exposed

   +40.1% projected growth · $129,210 median pay · 29,500 openings a year

   The fastest-growing job on this list, and the reason is structural: there are not enough primary-care physicians, and states keep widening what a nurse practitioner is licensed to do without one. AI is already useful in the paperwork around the visit — notes, coding, triage summaries — but the licence, the physical exam and the liability all sit with a person.

   Counted by BLS as “Nurse Practitioners” (29-1171).

2. 2.Data scientist🟡 Reshaped

   +33.5% projected growth · $112,590 median pay · 23,400 openings a year

   Demand is coming from every industry that now has more data than people who can read it. The irony is that AI is reshaping this job hardest from the inside: model-building and boilerplate analysis are increasingly automated, so the durable part is framing the question and defending the answer to people who will act on it.

   Counted by BLS as “Data Scientists” (15-2051).

3. 3.Cybersecurity analyst🟡 Reshaped

   +28.5% projected growth · $124,910 median pay · 16,000 openings a year

   Attackers got the same tools everyone else did, and the volume of attempts went up accordingly. AI handles the triage layer well — sorting the alerts worth looking at from the noise — which tends to raise the floor on what an analyst is expected to handle rather than reduce how many are needed.

   Counted by BLS as “Information Security Analysts” (15-1212).

4. 4.Actuary🟡 Reshaped

   +21.8% projected growth · $125,770 median pay · 2,400 openings a year

   A small profession that grows steadily because insurers and pension funds cannot price risk without one, and the credential takes years of exams that cannot be shortcut. Models do the computation; the judgment about which assumptions are defensible, and the signature on the result, remain a person.

   Counted by BLS as “Actuaries” (15-2011).

5. 5.Physician assistant🟢 Lightly exposed

   +20.4% projected growth · $133,260 median pay · 12,000 openings a year

   Grows for the same reason nurse practitioners do — health systems covering more patients without more physicians. Much of the work is hands-on and diagnostic in a room with someone, which is the part software reaches last.

   Counted by BLS as “Physician Assistants” (29-1071).

6. 6.Supply-chain analyst🟡 Reshaped

   +16.7% projected growth · $80,880 median pay · 26,400 openings a year

   Companies spent the last few years discovering what their supply chains actually looked like, and staffed up to stop being surprised again. Routine forecasting and reordering are being automated fast, so the work is shifting toward the exceptions — the disruptions no model saw coming.

   Counted by BLS as “Logisticians” (13-1081).

7. 7.Speech-language pathologist🟢 Lightly exposed

   +15.0% projected growth · $95,410 median pay · 13,300 openings a year

   Growth comes from two directions at once: earlier intervention in schools, and an ageing population recovering from strokes. The therapy is a relationship conducted in person over months, and progress depends on judgments about a specific human that generalise badly.

   Counted by BLS as “Speech-Language Pathologists” (29-1127).

8. 8.Occupational therapist🟢 Lightly exposed

   +13.8% projected growth · $98,340 median pay · 10,200 openings a year

   Ageing patients who want to stay in their own homes drive most of this. The assessment happens in someone’s kitchen, adapting to how that person actually lives, and the plan changes weekly based on what a therapist observes.

   Counted by BLS as “Occupational Therapists” (29-1122).

9. 9.Psychologist🟢 Lightly exposed

   +11.2% projected growth · $95,830 median pay · 4,800 openings a year

   Demand has outrun supply for years, and waiting lists are the visible symptom. AI chat tools have absorbed some of the lightest-touch support, which if anything concentrates the clinical caseload on the harder work rather than replacing it.

   Counted by BLS as “Clinical and Counseling Psychologists” (19-3033).

10. 10.Industrial engineer🟡 Reshaped

    +11.0% projected growth · $101,140 median pay · 25,200 openings a year

    Reshoring and factory automation both need someone to design the process being automated, which is why the job grows alongside the machines. Simulation and scheduling tools are doing more of the analysis, moving the work toward deciding what to build in the first place.

    Counted by BLS as “Industrial Engineers” (17-2112).

How this list was chosen

Every career we rate for AI exposure is matched to its federal occupation code, then ranked by the growth BLS projects for it. Pay is shown, not filtered — a wage cut-off would be a second judgement you could not see us making. A career appears only if it has both a projection and a published wage, which is why a few well-known jobs are missing: BLS suppresses some wages, and splits others (physicians, teachers) across codes too different to average into one row.

Growth and openings: BLS Employment Projections, 2024–2034. Wages: BLS OEWS, May 2024 national file (OCC_CODE / OCC_TITLE), 2024 release. These are annual datasets, not live hiring data — nothing here counts job adverts.

Worth saying plainly: the newest job titles are invisible to this data. There is no federal occupation code for a machine-learning engineer, a data engineer or a prompt engineer — the classification behind these projections was last revised in 2018, so that work is folded into older categories. A list built on federal data can show which established careers are growing and what AI is doing to them. It cannot show you the jobs that did not exist when the codes were written.

See the full picture: every career we rate, or how AI exposure works by major.