Low salaries, seniority-based pay scales driving Korean AI talent overseas

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Low salaries, seniority-based pay scales driving Korean AI talent overseas

Published: 09 Dec. 2025, 13:41 Updated: 09 Dec. 2025, 14:42

Audio report: written by reporters, read by AI

The LinkedIn app icon on a smartphone is seen in this illustration taken on Oct. 27. [REUTERS/YONHAP]

Korea pays artificial intelligence specialists far less than the United States, and its seniority-based wage system is accelerating a talent drain overseas, a report showed on Friday.

Workers with AI skills earned 6 percent more than those without such skills last year, the Bank of Korea’s (BOK) Labor Market Research Team and Park Geun-yong, a professor at the National University of Singapore Business School, found.

The report defined AI talent as workers with at least one of 12 skills tied to AI, such as machine learning and big data.

The AI premium has risen steadily from 1.3 percent in 2010. Even so, Korea trails major economies. The AI wage premium reaches 25 percent in the United States, 18 percent in Canada and about 15 percent in Britain, France and Australia.

“Korean AI talent working overseas accounted for about 16 percent in 2024, six percentage points higher than other workers,” said Oh Sam-il, an economist at the BOK.

“The number of Koreans with AI skills working in the United States rose to 6,300 last year as a large number of jobs and strong treatment in the U.S. AI industry pulled domestic talent overseas,” he added.

Roughly 11,000 Korean AI specialists were working abroad last year, with more than half based in the United States.

“AI workers tend to be younger because interest in AI began rising in the early 2010s. Korea’s seniority-based pay system does put them at a disadvantage,” said BOK economist Suh Dong-hyun.

The study analyzed more than 1.1 million Korean workers and over 10 million job history records from 2010 to 2024.

Researchers also surveyed human resources managers at about 400 companies and used profile data from global employment platform LinkedIn to assess the size, wages and mobility of AI talent.

This article was originally written in Korean and translated by a bilingual reporter with the help of generative AI tools. It was then edited by a native English-speaking editor. All AI-assisted translations are reviewed and refined by our newsroom.
BY KIM CHUL-WOONG [[email protected]]