Prompt Engineering Jobs Are Obsolete in 2025 – Here’s Why

Let me cast your minds back to artificial intelligence’s breakout year of 2023. AI assistants had just entered the mainstream, corporate adoption went from pilot to large-scale production, and AI-specific roles started hitting the job boards – including Prompt Engineer.

Experimenting with wording, formatting, and overall logic, the role of a Prompt Engineer is to get the best possible outcomes from AI models by querying them in the most efficient way. They were labelled as the “AI whisperers”, and with that came six-figure salaries. But the landscape now is much different, and the role is practically obsolete. Here’s why.

Why the Role Is Disappearing

When the Prompt Engineering role first emerged, companies were still trying to work out how to use AI in an effective and impactful way for their business. Alongside this, many were looking to gain a competitive edge – if you were able to utilize AI models quickly and generate high-quality outputs, you could outpace your competition in areas like content creation and customer service while having an overall great understanding of AI model input/output.

A 2023 McKinsey Global Survey revealed that 7% of organizations adopting AI had already hired Prompt Engineers, indicating early adoption of this role across various industries, and Anthropic were advertising Prompt Engineering roles with salary offers as high as $375K – which didn’t require in-depth technical knowledge or even a tech degree.

It was touted as the job of 2024, and a year later, research suggests that the role is no longer attractive to companies. Per a recent survey commissioned by Microsoft, 31,000 workers across 31 countries were asked what roles their companies are prioritizing, and Prompt Engineer was ranked second to last among new roles companies are considering adding in the next 12 to 18 months.

According to Indeed VP of AI Hannah Calhoon (per WSJ), job postings for prompt engineers are now minimal. User searches for this role on Indeed initially surged from two per million total U.S. searches in January 2023 (following ChatGPT’s release) to 144 per million in April 2023. However, Indeed reports that these searches have since plateaued at approximately 20 to 30 per million.

Model Maturity and Advancing Technology

The sudden fall in demand for the role can be attributed to several different factors. One of the main reasons was that the same AI models we first met two years ago have simply become far more intelligent. So much so that having the “correct” prompt really doesn’t exist anymore.

The likes of ChatGPT and Gemini – and their current advanced offerings, such as GPT4 and Gemini 2.5 – can easily pick up on spelling mistakes or misexplained information while also following up with you to gather more relevant information before tailoring their response.

As models have matured, we have subsequently outgrown the need for an “expert” to tell us how to engineer prompts. As Jared Spataro, Chief Marketing Officer of AI at Work at Microsoft, put it: “Two years ago, everybody said, ‘Oh, I think Prompt Engineer is going to be the hot job… [but] you don’t have to have the perfect prompt anymore.”

Prompt capabilities have progressed, ultimately outdating what a Prompt Engineer is likely to offer to businesses.

The Democratization of AI

As the practical use of AI becomes widespread and is used more commonly in workplaces, reserving the knowledge to one specific role no longer feels like a practical option. It’s becoming more important that everyone has a generally decent understanding of how to utilize the tool, get hands-on with it, and go through their own trial-and-error period. Thus, democratization has played its part in obliterating the once-popular role.

OpenAI themselves have recently revealed the OpenAI academy – a free learning platform that provides articles, demos, and tutorials on how to best utilize ChatGPT. Ultimately, free training resources really put into question the value of Prompt Engineers and the salaries that they’re expecting or demanding. If anyone in their own time can master the prompt process at no price, then anyone can practically become a Prompt Engineer.

Also, as the tech job market faces its trials and tribulations, it’s starting to make more sense for companies to upskill their current workforce in favor of hiring externally.

Nationwide, for example, has rolled out a companywide AI training program for all employees, with prompt engineering being one of the most popular courses within it.

Nationwide CTO, Jim Fowler, said: “Whether you’re in finance, HR or legal, we see this becoming a capability within a job title, not a job title to itself.”

The resources around AI are becoming clearer and more accessible, which poses a large issue for current and prospective Prompt Engineers.

Prompt Engineering Declines, Other AI Jobs on the Rise

As mentioned, the Prompt Engineering role is facing demand lows, ranking second from the bottom in Microsoft’s research and facing a plateau on Indeed. But on the other side of this, other specialist AI roles are facing a significant surge in popularity.

The three roles that are becoming more important for businesses, according to Microsoft’s research, are:

• AI Trainer: Operate in a supporting capacity and ensure chatbot interactions are seamless. Their primary function involves instructing chatbots on how to process information and engage in conversations.
• AI Data Specialist: Ensure that the models are fed clean, relevant, and structured data, which is arguably the most critical factor in AI accuracy and reliability.
• AI Security Specialist: Protect AI systems from threats like data poisoning and prompt injection, which become more urgent as AI tools are embedded in enterprise workflows.

With all these being more technical roles, the statistics suggest that businesses are prioritizing the safeguarding of AI at this stage, which is something that may not have been initially considered in the AI boom of 2023.

An AI Trainer, for example, possesses the skills of a Prompt Engineer but goes much further, acting as an analyzer, integrator, and optimizer to help companies manage, refine, and scale their use of AI models sustainably and strategically.

AI is advancing, and so are the expectations of companies when looking for AI experts. Unlike prompt engineering, which is often a surface-level interaction skill, these roles support the long-term infrastructure, trust, and performance of AI systems, making them far more strategic for companies.

Final Thoughts

Although the role may be growing obsolete, the core skill of effective communication with AI remains valuable. It is simply being absorbed into broader, more technical roles that reflect the evolving maturity of how businesses use these tools.

Let us know your thoughts in the comments below!