Aon plc, a leading global professional services firm, announced enhancements to its Radford McLagan Compensation Database as demand for artificial intelligence (AI) talent and roles intensifies across industries.

The Database now reports AI-specific job families, which include titles such as head of AI, applied research scientist, machine learning engineer and AI ethics, providing greater transparency into how the market defines and values these roles. Built on rigorously validated, non‑crowdsourced data, the Database covers over 30 million employees across 115 countries and 150 job functions.

"AI is requiring organisations to make faster decisions in an environment where roles, skills and expectations are changing in real time," said Byron Beebe, CEO of Human Capital for Aon. "As organisations redesign jobs to keep pace with AI, traditional frameworks are struggling to keep up. By expanding the Radford McLagan Compensation Database with new AI job families and enhanced analytics, we're helping leaders ground pay decisions in current, defensible market data — even as the market continues to evolve."

As AI reshapes how work gets done, organisations are confronting a shift in the skills they need and how those skills should be valued. Employers increasingly expect roles to evolve in real time, blending technical expertise with responsibilities spanning strategy, governance, risk and operations. As a result, job scope is changing faster than traditional role definitions and compensation frameworks were designed to handle.

Based on insights from the Radford McLagan Compensation Database, core AI roles such as machine learning engineers, applied data and research scientists and AI platform engineers are among the fastest growing roles in the market, alongside rising demand for adjacent skills such as data engineering and cybersecurity. At the same time, pay premiums for AI-driven skills are raising the stakes for organisations seeking to remain competitive while maintaining equity and defensibility in pay decisions.

These insights also complement Aon's AI workforce transformation solutions, which help organisations understand how AI is likely to automate or augment work at scale — guiding investment decisions across jobs, skills and talent strategies.