7 AI Jobs You Can Land Without a PhD (And How to Get Started Now)

For some, Artificial Intelligence, or AI, has become a part of everyday life. With AI assistant programs like Microsoft Copilot or ChatGPT, it’s not uncommon for young people to use it as a tool, whether it’s to help them do research for an essay or create a travel itinerary for their next trip. For others, though, the idea of integrating AI into everyday life is met with reluctance, as there are environmental impact concerns; Teen Vogue’s politics team recently reported that substantial quantities of electricity are often required to train, fine-tune, and run LLMs, creating carbon emissions and potential energy strain. Regardless, AI’s rapid development continues— and with that, jobs in the tech world are expanding, too.

Something as complex as AI being integrated into our society and across multiple industries means that new skills are required in the tech workforce to keep up with the demand. LinkedIn's 2025 Future of Work Report showed that AI-related job postings grew by 38% between 2020 and 2024, making it one of the fastest-growing categories globally. From data science to AI development, new jobs have been developed in the AI field that you might not have even known were a thing.

To break down some of these new career developments in tech, Teen Vogue spoke with a few Microsoft AI employees to understand their jobs and how they work with AI in their day-to-days:

Creative Director

Being a creative director looks a little different in the world of tech from what you might traditionally expect. In this role, the creative director works on shaping the AI model's personality, from the way it speaks to its mannerisms and overall demeanor when chatting with users.

“[Microsoft Copilot] is a world-class coach, it's a companion, it's your personal assistant. It's all of these things, but it's a new species, and it's thinking through how can I give this thing something that matters to you?” Microsoft AI’s creative director Rachel Taylor tells Teen Vogue. “So I'm very focused on words. That's what Copilot historically had for its gestures, and you need to be able to tell if it's smiling at you or if it's urging you on or how it wants to express itself.”

Personality Engineer

As a personality engineer in AI, you’re working closely with the creative director, focusing more on memory and emotional intelligence with AI and pushing the models to the limit, seeing where they can go and redefining what design means in the tech space.

“Design used to be about designing what things look like,” Design Director and Personality Engineer Matt Pistaschio says. “But now design is just about being creative [and] thinking about how to use this intelligence, which is basically a person-like thing. You work with users. I'm like a coach now. I coach the AI to work with people. And it's creative because you just have to find a way to say the right things to it and give it a character or you tell it where its purpose is or you give it different data and it becomes a different person-like thing and then you've just birthed a thing into the world that you can now give to people.”

Principal Researcher

If you're curious how to put your psychology degree to use, look into being a principal researcher. This job intersects psychology and technology and aims to bridge the gap between AI and its users. It is an integral part of product development to really understand the needs of those who interact with AI and how it can assist them. Mahsa Ershadi, who currently helms this role at Microsoft AI is a trained psychologist and uses her psychology degree to develop a product that can help improve user experience.