End of October 2026 (Data: Oct 16 through Oct 31)

I’m back!

Shockingly, the MN Business & Ops Transformation (MNBOT) tracker made it to your inbox for a round 2. 🤯🤗

As in the front half of October, I’ve again collected job postings that show how the state’s organizations are integrating AI into the business side work. Yeah, yeah. I'm a bit behind for the stats for the back half of October. Still interesting.

The star attraction, aka job postings, are at the bottom, in case you just want to go there, as if this meal with a "jump to recipe" link.

So, what did I learn?

State of the market

New orgs and new jobs also mean new confusion.

  • Say hello to organizations I hadn’t seen before among those posting AI-related jobs: EVEREVE, Huntington Bank (which I still count despite their buy-out), the U of M’s administration, plus smaller orgs.
  • Some job AI-ish titles don’t say what they really do, like a business GM role named “Sr. Dir, Innovation & Strategy”. Could just be me misunderstanding. But hiring managers and HR might also be rushed and trying to fit jobs to org structures not built for AI.

From "what's our AI strategy?" to "make it work.”

  • 9 of 13 roles found include “AI adoption” among their duties, and 6 include running AI in daily operations. (Some overlap there.)
  • Only 5 posts include “AI strategy.” In the last edition, strategy led (29 of 47).

More specialists, fewer people managers, at least this time. This might fluctuate.

  • 7 of 13 new AI-era postings are for individual contributors (early Oct: 13 of 47).
  • 5 roles are for narrow AI specialties: inference engineering, two legal AI roles, AI governance, AI fluency. (Mainly Thomsen Reuters.) This reflects a real split in org sophistication I see in AI efforts and the jobs they need as a result. I’ll have more to say about that in future. For now, just treating it as an observation.

  • Still very small job post counts: roughly 5 postings per week in the second half of October.
  • A few big companies still dominate: That’s the curse of early days and small sample sizes.
  • Median pay has a $183k base pay midpoint, reasonable for jobs that cluster at director level. I hadn’t touched on it last time because it’s so volatile, depending on what roles I find. But FWIW, that’s pretty similar to early Oct.

Fun reading

Stories I loved from other parts of the AI economy (related directly or indirectly to MN):

Did you know that there were no ballot initiatives related to data centers in Minnesota’s midterm election? It surprised me, given the mud-flinging related to, e.g., Google’s data center in Hermantown, where two pro-data center council members were voted out, it seems. It’s also unlike the 50-odd ballot questions about data centers around the U.S. this year. How do you think pro vs. anti data center initiatives fared? (Ballotpedia)

Tech jobs are increasingly converging in the SF Bay area. MN had better work to buck that trend! As Lenny’s Newsletter found by mashing up two job-related datasets, Silicon Valley has raised its share of U.S. Tech jobs from ~10 to 15% since 2022. Part of that is that job postings in the Bay Area are up 43% vs. last year. But still, yikes. If technology reflects culture and assumptions, it means that the West Coast lens will set more of everyone’s technology experience, including AI, which is the major share of Tech growth. (Lenny’s Newsletter)

A new kind of job impact from AI may be emerging, somewhere between AI job losses and job gains: Job access for people with fewer qualifications. AI can simplify the work or coach workers in spaces with chronic staff shortages, so people with less training can still get it done. This could even lead to new jobs. The observations came from the recent German Summit for Machine Building. But in a state like ours with lots of machine, industrial control, and similar activity (I see you Banner, Turck, SICK, et al!), that’s relevant here too. (Tagesschau news, auto-translated from German)

The jobs

Drum roll, please … here they are:

Technical, data and AI (6)

Transformation and change (4)

Business strategy, operations and leadership (3)

Consulting (client work) (3)

Program management (2)

May you ever keep the humans in charge of your own AI!