Have you heard about the 35K AI jobs that didn't exist last year?

While everyone's busy panicking about job losses, a quiet hiring boom is revealing an uncomfortable truth about how unprepared we really are.

Here's a number that has my attention - 35,000.
That's roughly how many AI policy and governance jobs are currently posted on Indeed alone.

Jobs that barely existed eighteen months ago. Jobs that companies are now scrambling to fill because - and here's the uncomfortable part - most organizations have no AI policy whatsoever.

Let that sink in. 
Your employees are already using AI. They're using it on their phones during lunch. They're using it at home to prep for meetings. They're quietly feeding your client data, your strategy docs, your proprietary frameworks into systems that learn from everything they touch. 

And you have no policy governing any of it.

Welcome to ‘the great AI governance scramble of 2026’.

The Hiring Boom Nobody Predicted

I've spent the past few years helping businesses implement AI - not as a shiny toy, but as actual business infrastructure. And I'll admit: even I didn't see this particular wave coming.

We all heard the doom predictions. 
AI will eliminate millions of jobs. 
Entire industries will collapse. 
Radiologists, lawyers, copywriters - all toast. 
The robots are coming, and they're hungry.

But here's what the fear merchants missed: for every job AI threatens, it creates a governance vacuum that humans need to fill. Someone has to write the policies. Someone has to train the workforce. Someone has to figure out what happens when your intern accidentally feeds your merger documents into ChatGPT.

Helen Patterson, an HR consultant I spoke with recently on my podcast ‘AI Literacy for Entrepreneurs’, ran this exact search and found the numbers staggering. 

If 35,000 companies are hiring for AI policy roles, that means 35,000 companies currently don't have anyone doing this work. And those are just the ones who've woken up.

Shadow AI Is the New Shadow IT

Remember shadow IT? That phenomenon where employees built entire tech stacks outside of what the IT department approved because official channels were too slow, too restrictive, or too clueless?

We're living through the AI version right now, and it's happening faster.

Companies issue blanket bans: "No AI except our internal Copilot." Very sensible. Very secure. And completely unenforceable - because everyone has a smartphone. The tools are free. The temptation to cut a two-hour task down to twenty minutes is irresistible. So people use AI anyway. They just don't tell you.

This is a leadership problem disguised as a technology problem.

The intentional organizations - the companies that figured out where AI creates genuine value and where it creates genuine risk, then built guardrails that actually make sense are few and far between.

AI is Not an IT Project

Most leaders are treating AI strategy like they treated CRM implementation in 2003. Hand it to IT. Let the technical people figure it out. Check in quarterly.

That approach is catastrophically wrong for AI.

AI implementation isn't a technology rollout. It's a cultural transformation. It touches every department, every workflow, every assumption about how work gets done. It requires HR at the table at the very minimum - not as an afterthought, but as a strategic partner. Because the real questions aren't technical. They're human. 

What happens to the role when 60% of it can be automated? Do you lay people off, or do you upskill them? What's the philosophical stance your company takes on AI-generated content? What's proprietary, what's shareable, and who decides?

These aree leadership questions. And if you're not asking them, your competitors are.

The Opportunity Hidden in the Chaos

I used to resent when clients asked for extra meetings. Off-the-books check-ins felt like calendar bloat, another demand on time I didn't have. Now? I lean in. "Sure, let's talk. Any opportunity to talk is a good thing."

What changed? 

AI gave me my time back. The grunt work - the administrative overhead that used to eat my days - now takes minutes instead of hours. And that freed-up time goes exactly where it should: into actual human connection.

That's the real promise of AI, buried under all the hype and fear. Not that it replaces humans, but that it clears away the noise so humans can do what only humans can do. 

The strategic thinking. 
The relationship building. 
The mentorship. 
The creativity.

But you only unlock that promise if you're intentional. If you have a strategy. If you stop treating AI as either a magic wand or an existential threat and start treating it as what it is: a tool that requires thoughtful implementation.

Want to go deeper on building an AI-forward organization without losing the human element? Listen to my full conversation with HR consultant Helen Patterson on the AI Literacy for Entrepreneurs podcast - we dig into everything from policy frameworks to why mentorship matters more, not less, in the age of AI.

And if you're a founder ready to stop experimenting randomly and start implementing strategically, join my AI implementation mastermind, Marketing Power Circle