In some fields, listing AI skills can hurt you

Adding "AI skills" to your resume might tank your interview odds.
Researchers sent 1,185 identical resumes to employers. Half randomly included AI qualifications.

The result?
No overall effect on callbacks.

But the breakdown reveals something strange:

Engineering: 2.5x more interviews with AI skills
Marketing: 2.3x more interviews
Finance: No effect whatsoever
Logistics: 0.69x (31% fewer interviews)
IT: 0.5x (half as many interviews)

Same skills.
Opposite outcomes.

Here's what's happening: In Marketing and Engineering, AI skills signal valuable complementary capabilities. You're the strategist who can interpret model outputs. The engineer who bridges technical and business requirements.

In IT? You're suddenly overqualified. Employers see flight risk—someone hunting for higher-paying AI roles. In Finance and Logistics, the skills don't map to daily work, so they read as résumé padding.

The researchers controlled for everything: job requirements, company size, industry AI exposure. The pattern held across 40 days of tracking.

Wildest finding: AI skills helped most in industries with low AI exposure. Where AI is already embedded, the signal drowns in noise.  This isn't "AI skills don't matter." It's "AI skills matter differently depending on where you're applying."

What are you seeing? Do AI qualifications change how you evaluate candidates, or do they get lost in the scroll?

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Source: The Elusive Returns to AI Skills: Evidence from a Field Experiment, Firpo et al, 2025