Three quarters of job listings mentioning AI are for non-technical roles like customer service, marketing and accounting.
What’s happening: New data from Employment Hero’s February Jobs Report shows AI literacy is rapidly becoming a baseline expectation across the Australian workforce.
Why this matters: Employers are looking for people who have upskilled with AI and can apply it practically across everyday business functions, and that changes how SME owners should be writing job ads, screening candidates and thinking about their existing team.
There was a time when listing Microsoft Office on your CV was enough to signal you were across the basics. Then came smartphones, cloud software and the expectation that everyone in the workplace could navigate digital tools without hand-holding.
AI literacy is the next version of that shift, and according to new data from Employment Hero, it is already here.
Employment Hero’s February Jobs Report, which draws on employment data from over 350,000 businesses and 1.5 million employees across Australia, found that growth in AI-related jobs has increased 13 fold since the fourth quarter of 2024. But the more telling finding is where that growth is happening.
Only 25% of job listings that mention AI in the description also include AI in the job title. The remaining 75% are for roles like customer service, marketing, healthcare and accounting, positions where AI capability is becoming an expectation rather than a specialisation.
“We’re watching AI literacy become the new digital literacy,” said Ben Thompson, CEO and Co-Founder of Employment Hero. “A decade ago, every job required basic computer skills. Now we’re seeing the same shift with AI. This is honestly great news for job seekers, particularly those with non-technical backgrounds. Employers aren’t insisting on technical qualifications. They’re just looking for people who’ve upskilled with AI and will provide leverage to their business.”
The dominant term appearing in job listings is Generative AI, and employers are using it to describe a capability they want across the board, not a role they want to fill in isolation.
That distinction matters for small business owners. The message from the data is not that SMEs need to hire a machine learning engineer or a prompt engineer. It is that the customer service coordinator, the marketing assistant and the bookkeeper they are already looking for should ideally know how to use AI tools to work faster, more accurately and with less supervision.
Machine Learning Engineer is the most in-demand specifically AI-titled role, according to the report. But for most small businesses, that hire is neither relevant nor affordable. What is relevant is that the generalist roles they are filling every day are quietly being redefined.
What SME owners are actually looking for
The Employment Hero data reflects something many small business owners are already sensing but may not have put into words yet. AI tools are only as useful as the people using them. A business owner who has invested in AI software but has no one on the team who knows how to apply it is not getting the return they paid for.
Thompson framed it in terms of leverage. Employers are looking for people who have upskilled with AI and will provide leverage to their business, not those who can build AI systems from scratch.
For small business owners writing job ads right now, that is a practical prompt. Are you asking about AI capability in your interviews? Are you listing it as a preference in your job descriptions? The businesses that start treating AI fluency as a baseline expectation now will find themselves ahead of the curve when the shift becomes universal, which the data suggests is not far away.
Australian SME hiring is up 6.8% year-on-year despite consecutive interest rate hikes and softening consumer sentiment, according to the same Employment Hero report. That resilience is notable on its own. But the more forward-looking story is not just that small businesses are hiring. It is that they are quietly rewriting what they are hiring for.
How to get ahead of it
For small business owners, the practical implication is straightforward. AI literacy does not need to be a formal qualification or a line on a CV. It can show up in how a candidate talks about the tools they use, how they have applied AI to solve a problem at a previous job, or how quickly they have picked up new technology in the past.
On the existing team side, the shift is equally relevant. Upskilling current staff in AI tools, whether through short online courses, internal experimentation or simply encouraging them to use AI in their daily workflows, is increasingly the difference between a team that scales with the business and one that becomes a bottleneck.
Thompson’s conclusion from the broader report carries weight here. “SMEs aren’t waiting for perfect conditions. They’re hiring, increasing wages, and getting on with it.”
The ones moving fastest are not just hiring more. They are hiring differently.
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