Why companies are hiring philosophers in the AI era

For years we heard that a philosophy degree was a fast track to unemployment. The data tells a different story, and the shift is coming from the very heart of technological innovation: the companies building AI.

I have spent the last twenty years moving between writing, strategy and product, in a job that combines linguistic sensitivity with systemic reasoning. When I started reading the numbers on philosophers and humanities graduates hired by big tech, I recognized something familiar: the value of a hybrid profile, able to stand between people and technology.

Italian data challenges the stereotype

Let’s start with the facts. Of 7,003 humanities graduates in 2021, AlmaLaurea interviewed 4,171 of them in 2024 about their employment status three years after graduation. The result: 8 out of 10 are working, 1 is still pursuing further education, and only 1 out of 10 is unemployed.

Philosophy degrees are also growing steadily. In 2015 there were 1,947 bachelor’s graduates, and by 2024 that number had risen to 2,454, a 26% increase in a decade. Compared to 2006, when graduates numbered just 1,287, the growth is close to 90%.

Another useful data point: in 2024 the employment rate among Italians aged 25 to 64 with a tertiary degree reached 84.7%, compared to 74.0% for those with only a high school diploma. Italy also records the highest share in the European Union of tertiary students enrolled in culture related fields, at 19.8% against an EU average of 13.8%.

The global picture: human skills in higher demand

The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 offers a perspective consistent with the Italian data. 63% of surveyed companies cite the skills gap as the main barrier to transformation. While technical AI skills are growing at a very fast pace, human skills such as analytical thinking, resilience, leadership and collaboration remain central.

Analytical thinking, in particular, is the single most requested skill: seven out of ten companies consider it essential in 2025. A clear signal for anyone who built their training on argumentation and conceptual analysis, the core tools of a philosophical education.

Philosophers are joining big tech

The most telling signal comes from the companies actually building AI. Daniela Amodei, co-founder and president of Anthropic, told Fortune that the things that make us human will become even more important in the era of intelligent models. Anna Koivuniemi, who leads Google DeepMind’s Impact Accelerator, has said that studying AI requires a multidisciplinary team, with ethics experts and philosophers working alongside engineers in the lab.

In Italy, Diletta Huyskes is a concrete example of this crossover. She holds a philosophy degree, is currently a sociology PhD candidate at the University of Milan, and co-founded the benefit corporation Immanence, bringing discussions on ethics and humanities skills directly into companies developing AI systems.

University programs are adapting too. Piergiorgio Donatelli launched Italy’s first degree course in philosophy and artificial intelligence at Sapienza University of Rome in 2022. Italy now counts roughly 45 degree courses in artificial intelligence, and some, like the one at Sapienza, integrate the study of philosophy into a single path. A similar model has existed for years at Oxford, with its Computer Science and Philosophy degree.

Why this is happening now

AI is good at generating, processing data, recognizing patterns. It is less good at deciding what matters, where the ethical line sits in an automated choice, how to interpret ambiguity of meaning. These are exactly the questions philosophy has trained on for millennia: what does this word actually mean, what are the implicit premises of an argument, who is accountable for a decision.

The most aware technology companies have understood that someone needs to ask these questions before a product scales, not after something has already gone wrong. Bias in the data, model hallucinations, algorithmic transparency: these are all problems where conceptual analysis matters as much as code. I have talked about this struggle in a recent article on AI.

What this means if you work in content and strategy

If you work in content strategy, UX writing or communications, this data is more than an academic curiosity. It confirms that the skills many of us built our careers on, argumentative ability, attention to language, critical reading of context, remain a real competitive advantage in the AI economy.

You don’t need to become a philosopher to apply this principle. You need to recognize that the value of a humanities background lies not in resisting technology, but in knowing how to govern it wisely, asking the right questions at the right time.

Philosophers and humanists for AI