Workers are rewriting their LinkedIn histories to add AI skills. Here's what they're dropping.

A new study reveals that US workers are revising their LinkedIn profiles to incorporate AI skills, marking a shift in job market dynamics. David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images found that one in five users made changes to their old jobs. The researchers, led by Stanford economist Nicholas Bloom, analyzed 29.4 million LinkedIn profiles and discovered that more than half of those edits involved adding AI-related terminology such as AI, GPT, LLM, and artificial intelligence.

At the same time, workers are adding and removing remote-work language, likely due to recent return-to-office mandates. A decline in adding diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) related terms was also observed, coinciding with President Donald Trump's executive orders targeting DEI programs. This practice, dubbed "time travel," was most prevalent in technology and information sectors, with 31.6% of workers retroactively editing old roles.

The median edit occurred over four years after the job ended. The researchers caution that LinkedIn profiles should not be considered a fixed record of the past, as a 2026 snapshot would overstate the prevalence of AI-related skills in 2022 by around 30%.