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.
“I get to spend my days, literally all day with our users, having these types of conversations where I'm like, ‘What do you use Copilot for? What do you like about it? What can we change about it? What's not working for you?’ And the stories we hear are unbelievable,” Ershadi says. “I also feel like it's a really privileged pioneering role where I get to hear from both our users and people who are hesitant about becoming users and then bring that back to colleagues like Rachel and say, ‘Hey, this is what we're hearing. How can we use what we're hearing to humanize [our product] even more?’”
Designer
As an AI app designer, this role is all about visual identity for the brand, focusing on how AI looks within the app, the colors used, and the typography. Their job is to make sure everything is aesthetically on brand as well as develop in-product experiences for users within the app.
“It's just such a pleasure and so fun to work on something new,” designer Lucas Fitzpatrick shares. “And you have a new technology, you have a new way of interaction in the world. You can approach it with first principles. ‘What's the best way to reimagine this interaction? How do we take and leverage all the things we know about designing different things about different modes of interaction?’ You're at a point in history where you can look back at so much that's been built and then reimagine it towards the future. And to be a designer and creative in this moment, it's one of the most exciting things I can imagine.”
Product Manager
AI can expand just beyond an assistance app. It can also be a product within a product. As a product manager in AI, it entails how exactly it can be integrated within other products like laptop computers or other hardware.
“As a product manager, I work really closely with our engineering teams and our design teams to figure out what the constraints are of what we can build technically, and also how do we make it a beautiful and great user experience,” Windows AI experiences senior product manager Karina Chang says. “[AI] is changing so fast, that it's been hard to almost build products for technology that changes under your feet sometimes. There's new innovations almost every day, and there's always questions like, ‘Can we do that? How do we bring that into our product to help users out?’”
Industrial Designer
Similar to a product manager, an industrial designer’s job is to lead AI experience design on specific hardware, like Microsoft’s Surface laptops.
“Being an industrial designer, it's about how the user uses the device and the experiences, so we really have this philosophy that the hardware should fade into the background so the user can focus on what they're trying to get done, and so that comes down to the quality bar of our hardware,” senior industrial designer Jazmine Hoyle shares. “Industrial designers have become more and more involved with AI, just in how users are interacting with their devices and kind of how it's accelerating their workflows or even allowing them to do things like they haven't done before.”
Product Marketing
As AI continues to develop, product marketing plays a crucial role in championing the customer and understanding how to bring together the various teams listed above to build the right product for them.
“AI can be used in so many interesting ways that not all consumers or customers are even super aware that it's AI in the background that's helping make their experience better,” Adrienne Brewbaker, director of product marketing, shares. “It's a cool midway point, where we get to work with our inbound engineering and design teams, but then also shape the story and the messaging that we get to go tell the world.
