Artificial intelligence has quickly become another skill employers can ask about during the hiring process. Apparently, job seekers are feeling pretty confident about their abilities. Employers, however, may have a somewhat different definition of what it means to be AI ready.
A new survey from Express Employment Professionals and The Harris Poll finds that 93 percent of U.S. job seekers believe they have the AI skills employers want. That sounds encouraging until you look at what companies actually expect. While only 35 percent of job seekers think employers are seeking advanced or expert AI abilities, 41 percent of hiring managers say candidates need skills at that level.
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The difference isn’t enormous, but it points to a larger problem. Knowing how to ask ChatGPT a question or generate an image doesn’t necessarily mean someone knows how to use AI effectively at work. In fact, nine in 10 hiring managers surveyed want candidates to have at least basic AI skills, while 54 percent consider AI proficiency very important or absolutely essential when evaluating applicants.
Employers also appear to want more than familiarity with AI tools. Forty-five percent of hiring managers pointed to awareness of data privacy and security concerns, while the same percentage want candidates who can clearly communicate AI findings or concepts. Another 37 percent cited an understanding of AI bias and fairness.
Those expectations make sense as generative AI finds its way into more workplaces. An employee who can produce something with AI but doesn’t understand whether sensitive company information should be fed into a chatbot could create more problems than they solve. Likewise, getting an answer from an AI model isn’t particularly useful if someone can’t evaluate it, explain it, or recognize when it is wrong.
There is also an interesting generational divide in how workers judge their own abilities. Fifty-five percent of millennial job seekers describe their AI skills as advanced or expert, as do 50 percent of Gen Z respondents. That drops to 31 percent among Gen X and just 12 percent among baby boomers and seniors.
Younger job seekers also seem more aware of where the bar is heading. Forty-three percent of Gen Z and millennials believe employers expect advanced or expert AI abilities. Only 25 percent of Gen X respondents and 10 percent of baby boomers and seniors believe companies expect that level of proficiency.
None of this means traditional workplace skills have suddenly stopped mattering. When job seekers were asked what they believe employers consider absolutely essential, dependability and work ethic each came in at 47 percent, followed by communication skills at 45 percent. Technical skills reached 29 percent, while AI skills came in at only 19 percent.
That may ultimately be the more useful takeaway. AI isn’t replacing the basics of being a good employee, but it is becoming another layer on top of them. Someone who communicates well, shows up reliably, and understands their job may increasingly be expected to know how to work with AI too.
There is an important limitation here. These results measure what people say about their AI abilities, not what they can demonstrate. The Harris Poll didn’t sit job seekers down and test whether they could build an AI workflow, spot a hallucination, or recognize a privacy problem. Someone describing themselves as “advanced” may have a very different idea of advanced than a hiring manager does.
The research was conducted online in the United States. The job seeker survey included 1,000 adults who were looking for work and ran from May 19 through June 8, 2026. A separate survey of 1,006 U.S. hiring decision-makers ran from May 13 through June 1.
With AI tools becoming easier to use, simply knowing how to operate one may no longer be much of a differentiator. The harder part is knowing when to use AI, when not to trust it, and what to do with its output. Job seekers may overwhelmingly believe they’re ready, but employers are starting to define “ready” in considerably more demanding terms.
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