Dive Brief:
- Forget employment websites. U.S. workers are now turning to ChatGPT for answers to their queries on compensation and wage benchmarking, according to OpenAI, the artificial intelligence company that created ChatGPT.
- Part of the reason may be the “information frictions” that exist in trying to determine how much a position pays and how that compares to the broader market, OpenAI said. “Search is costly; asking about pay can be socially awkward or risky; and informal networks distribute wage information unequally,” the company said.
- Most often, workers look for help with pay calculations, such as converting hourly wages to an annual salary, and to figure out “what a concrete job, career path, or employer might plausibly pay before they apply, negotiate, or switch,” OpenAI said.
Dive Insight:
The research found that searches for wage information were more concentrated for jobs in creative and athletic industries, management and healthcare and less prevalent for positions in office and administrative support, food service and production.
“Workers in large, standardized sectors such as office support or food service are numerous, but their wages are more likely to be posted, familiar, or have limited room for negotiation. By contrast, fields that overindex in wage search are the ones where compensation is more uncertain, more negotiable, or more consequential for mobility,” OpenAI said.
Workers in higher-paying positions were also more likely to conduct searches because “higher wage levels raise the payoff to getting the decision right, whether the decision is to invest in training, pursue a switch, negotiate harder, or stay put,” the research found. Likewise, 18% of searches were related to entrepreneurship, as workers looked for answers on “what could I realistically clear after costs and variable demand?”
Information about pay is slowly becoming more available, as more states enact pay transparency laws. A Payscale report released Tuesday showed that in 2026, nine of the states with pay transparency laws had closed the controlled gender pay gap, including California, Washington, D.C., and New York, for example.
The tides are shifting on pay transparency as these laws become more widespread; 82% of U.S. companies surveyed by WTW said they were either communicating, planning or considering communicating pay ranges with employees, and 79% said they did so for external candidates, according to an August 2025 report.
Workers have long shown their desire for more pay information. More than 2 in 5 U.S. workers said they’d lose interest in a role if there wasn’t a salary range in the job ad, a June 2024 Robert Half report found.