New data shows companies are NOT hiring for this AI skill

Here’s what we’re reading and thinking about this week:

Being "good at ChatGPT" stopped being a hiring edge this year. Across about 550 big employers, job openings asking for basic prompting skills fell 25% after peaking in January.

So are people no longer hiring for AI skills????

No. The bar just moved.

SINCE JANUARY.

Because in the same research method, openings asking for people who can “build with AI” have now gone up 51%.

And most people hear "build" and think, that's for the engineers, not me.

But look at who uses AI every day at work right now… The office manager who has it draft the vendor emails. The recruiter who has it clean up job posts. The operations coordinator who pastes in the same spreadsheet every Monday and asks for the same summary. Those people are the closest to the skill companies are hiring for... they just don't know it yet.

In today’s world… "Build" means playbooks, not code

It used to be the case that building meant coding an app or creating something that IT has to approve…

But nowadays, if you can write a process an AI can follow, specific enough that you don't have to explain it again every time… you can build.

Prompting is asking AI for one-off tasks…

Building is writing down how the thing gets done once, so the AI - and your team - can run it.

Aka what we call playbooking 🙂 

(Btw: we're teaching exactly how to go from prompting to building, live, next Monday. Save your seat here.)

Storytime! What the jump actually looks like

We watched someone make it on a call this week.

She's chief of staff to the head of operations at a big manufacturing company, and one of our students. Her first playbook was for her own work, turning meeting notes into a clean summary. Her boss saw it. Now he wants one for him.

Every department head updates a monthly number by hand, and somebody has to chase them for it. He wants the chasing to happen on its own.

In her words: "I'm sweating because I'm like, don't worry, we'll get it done for you. And I'm like, what am I doing?"

Halfway through, she stopped and asked, "So what is the AI doing?" In her head, it was still her opening the spreadsheet and sending the emails.

What got her unstuck was one question: if you hired an intern to do this, what would you tell them? On the 20th, open the spreadsheet, see who hasn't filled it in, and email them the link and the due date. Do it again on the 25th.

That's the playbook. She already knew it, she'd just never written it down.

The hard part is building something usable…

Getting AI to do the task was never the hard part. Getting the company to use it is.

Her boss has to see it work before anyone else will try it. Her company runs on Microsoft, and honestly she'd rather use a different AI tool... but people need to see it done "with our tools, not just any tool," or it won't spread.

So the plan is boring on purpose. One playbook, shown to one boss, then rolled out to everyone. Run it by hand for a while first, because you always change things once you see it work. And don't build a fancy system for organizing playbooks until you have about ten of them running.

"Isn't that what the AI specialist is for?"

Her company did hire one, at a serious price, to plug AI into their finance software.

But here’s what’s missing…

(that we’ll say until we are blue in the face…)

Integrating AI into your operations isn’t a one-off project.

She said it better than we could: "Everyone that works in a spreadsheet should be able to use AI."

Specialists can be the ones to own the deep systems.

But everyone needs to be writing the playbooks for their own work.

Companies need both, and the second one is exactly what those job openings are asking for.

What to do this week

1. Find the prompt you've typed the most this month.

2. Write down what you'd tell an intern doing that task: when it starts, what they need, the steps, and what done looks like.

3. Start with your easiest task, not your most valuable one. Easy ones actually get finished, and finished ones get copied.

What's the task you've asked AI to do 20 times and never written down? Hit reply. We're collecting these.

Cheers,

🪄 The AI Exchange Team

P.S. Want to learn how to write your first playbook? Join us live on Monday, October 26 at 5pm CT for The Playbooking Method, a free masterclass on building playbooks your team and your AI can both run. It's live only, no replay. Grab a seat.

LINKS

For your reading list 📚

• In case you missed it: 95% of HR leaders say people are doing AI work that isn't in their job description.

• Microsoft now calls AI agents "your newest insiders" and is giving them approval steps and an off switch.

• 91% of Anthropic's own staff think AI makes a Nobel-level discovery by 2030. Only 39% of Americans agree. Someone's going to be very surprised.

• Eight states sued OpenAI on the same day, saying ChatGPT misled people about how safe it is. The biggest coordinated state action against an AI company yet.

That's all!

We'll see you again soon. Thoughts, feedback and questions are much appreciated - respond here or shoot us a note at [email protected]

Cheers,

🪄 The AMP Team (formerly: the AI Exchange Team)