Tracking the Tech of the Future with Job Postings: AI Leads the Count, Cloud Leads the Spread

Key Takeaways:

• Two University of Liechtenstein researchers published a study in the Swiss Journal of Business built on 1,079,079 LinkUp postings in Switzerland, from September through December 2024 to track companies’ strategic weighting of technologies to their future. 

• AI led on volume, appearing in 438 of the 2,795 forward-looking postings, ahead of automation (320) and machine learning (234).

• Cloud computing appeared in only 52 postings but was spread more evenly across industries than anything else in the study, including AI. Biotechnology was the reverse: more mentions, almost all in one sector.

• Our US data shows their four-month window landed on the peak of US cloud hiring, which is down about 25% since.

• Job postings are the most forward-looking data source from a business-practice perspective, because a company must hire people before it can develop a technology or file a patent. 

A new study in the Swiss Journal of Business used 1.08 million LinkUp postings from Switzerland to find which technologies companies are treating as important to their future. AI leads by mention count. Cloud computing is spread most evenly across industries.

Two researchers at the University of Liechtenstein have published a study of Swiss job postings in the Swiss Journal of Business, using LinkUp data: 1,079,079 postings from Switzerland, live from September through December 2024.

They wanted to know which technologies Swiss companies are treating as important to their future. Patents and publications are the usual sources for this work. Both are early, but slow to reach anyone: long review and application cycles sit between the research and the signal. Because a company has to hire people before it can build anything, job postings are the earliest business-side signal that a firm has committed to a technology.

The authors kept only postings that used the word technology alongside a forward-looking one in their job description: future, foresight, trend, or emerging. That left 2,795 postings out of more than a million. They then pulled the specific technologies named in those descriptions, grouped them into 20 fields, and measured how evenly each was spread across 20 industries.

AI led the count, appearing in 438 of the 2,795 postings, ahead of automation at 320 and machine learning at 234.

The most interesting result was cloud computing. It appeared in only 52 postings, but was spread more evenly across industries than any other technology in the study, including AI. No single sector accounted for its hiring. The likeliest read is that cloud has moved from a specialist domain to baseline infrastructure. 

U.S. active listings for cloud computing roles rose 81% into a September 2024 peak—the exact window the Swiss study measured—and have fallen about 25% since.