Chicago Ranks No. 3 For AI Job Growth As Office Market Stands To Benefit
The number of roles tied to artificial intelligence is picking up in the Chicago market, with companies’ bets on new hires potentially bolstering the city’s office market in the coming years.
Hiring momentum for AI-related roles has picked up in the Windy City: Chicago trailed only New York City and San Francisco for year-over-year increase in AI-related job postings, at just fewer than 10,000, according to data provided to Bisnow by Avison Young Market Intelligence.
That has come as AI companies’ office footprints continue to grow nationally, hitting 9.2M SF in total as of the second quarter. AI firms’ square footage in Chicago reached 308K SF at the halfway point of the year, according to real estate technology company VTS.
Many of the jobs companies are posting now require skills or experience working with large language models and an understanding of top AI platforms and deploying agents to make workflows more efficient, Avison Young senior analyst Sean Boyd said. Those jobs aren’t merely concentrated at tech companies and are now available across a swath of industries, including medical, finance and education.
“There are all kinds of jobs and sectors that are starting to kind of boost the need for AI, if you will, locally,” Boyd said.
Building tours by AI-focused prospective tenants in the U.S. jumped 85% through May, with Chicago showing signs of AI growth, according to VTS.
Turing, the University of Chicago, PricewaterhouseCoopers and Accenture saw the largest year-over-year increases in the city’s AI-related job postings. Turing led the way by a wide margin, with an increase of more than 900 roles, according to Avison Young.
While computer engineering roles are some of the most commonly linked to AI-related hiring, others like account executive positions, consulting roles or entry-level analyst jobs at banks are also raising their baseline expectations for employees’ AI familiarity. AI-related job postings in Chicago surged 80.6% from 2024 to 2025 and have already surpassed last year's full-year total just six months into 2026.
“There are jobs that are not exactly what you think of,” Boyd said.
Nationally, office-using employment is 10% higher than it was in 2019. In Chicago, there have been six straight quarters with growth in office-using employment, Avison Young market intelligence analyst Alex Woods said. In Q2, the city saw about a 15% to 20% growth quarter-over-quarter.
Office demand spiked dramatically during previous tech booms, like the dot-com, Web 2.0 and mobile web era, to match aggressive growth patterns, according to Avison Young data. Today, these companies occupy only a fraction of the space they did at their peaks, and the staying power of the AI-fueled run-up in office space remains to be seen.
As a result, there is no guarantee an increase in hiring in CRE’s most closely watched sector will lead to an uptick in Chicago office demand.
“We're not seeing that these AI hirings are dictating leasing trends necessarily,” Woods said. “There doesn't seem to be a one-size-fits-all when it comes to leasing trends with this hiring of AI jobs.”
