The fastest-growing requirement in planning jobs was not AI itself

doda compared requirements in Tokyo-based sales planning, business planning/development and corporate planning job postings between 2022 and 2025.

Across the three roles, the largest increase was the project execution category at +3.1 percentage points. AI, machine learning and generative-AI requirements grew to about 1.9 times their 2022 level, but appeared in 3.6% of 2025 postings.

As AI spread, employers were also increasing demand for the human capability to move projects across people and organizations.

Postings with project-execution requirements also sat in higher salary bands

For 2025 postings, doda compared the median of advertised salary-range midpoints between postings containing a skill category and postings without it.

For project execution, the difference was +¥500,000 in sales planning, +¥750,000 in business planning/development and +¥500,000 in corporate planning.

This is not evidence that learning project execution causes salary to rise by those amounts, nor is it a comparison of final accepted salaries. It is a posting-level association showing which kinds of planning roles appear in higher advertised pay bands.

AI may move the expensive part of planning work downstream

A simplified planning workflow runs from information gathering to organization, analysis, document creation, stakeholder coordination and execution.

Generative AI can reduce the cost of several early-stage activities such as search, summarization and drafting. But faster documents do not automatically move sales, engineering, finance and legal teams toward a common decision.

As preparation becomes cheaper, the bottleneck can shift toward Judgment → Coordination → Execution.

Corporate planning showed a +5.9 percentage-point rise in project execution

Within sales planning, sales skills rose the most at +6.1 percentage points while project execution rose +2.5 points.

In business planning/development, project execution was the largest increase at +2.5 points. In corporate planning it rose +5.9 points, the largest increase among the three roles.

That matters because higher-level planning work is not only about producing analysis; it is also about converting management decisions into coordinated organizational action.

The gap may widen between people who create plans and people who make plans real

AI can make market research, presentation drafts and idea generation faster.

Coordinating specifications with engineers, resolving objections from sales, recalculating investment with finance, negotiating with partners and taking a project to launch require a different capability stack.

If AI narrows the gap in document production, evidence of what a person actually moved and completed can become more distinctive.

Workers expect AI to matter, but domain expertise still ranked first

Axis Consulting surveyed 647 workers who use AI for work at least monthly and focused mainly on 603 whose employers promote or permit AI use.

81.9% said AI proficiency would create differences in individual market value. Yet the most common capability they wanted to strengthen was domain expertise at 44.1%, ahead of AI proficiency at 41.6%.

That suggests AI capability and deep problem knowledge may be complements rather than substitutes.

Domain Expertise × AI Leverage × Execution

In the Axis survey, 78.4% said AI helped them apply existing knowledge and experience to new work or roles, while 58.0% said AI expanded career options.

There was a 54.4 percentage-point gap in the belief that AI expands career options between those who felt they could reuse prior knowledge in new work and those who did not. This is an association in a self-reported survey, not causal proof.

Combined with the posting data, a useful career model may be Domain Expertise × AI Leverage × Execution rather than AI skill alone.

BANSEOG VIEW | AI can change where the premium sits inside a job

Across the 2022 and 2025 planning-job comparison, project execution was the fastest-growing skill category, and 2025 postings containing it appeared in salary bands whose midpoint medians were ¥500,000–¥750,000 higher depending on role.

Banseog reads the shift as AI lowers the cost of preparation → Bottleneck moves downstream → Judgment & Coordination → Execution Evidence earns a premium.

The career question is not only whether a planner can use AI. It is whether domain expertise and AI leverage can be converted into coordinated action and finished outcomes.

BANSEOG VIEW

Banseog View — Preparation Cost ↓ → Bottleneck Downstream → Judgment → Coordination → Execution

As AI reduces research and drafting cost, planning bottlenecks can move toward coordination and execution.

The ¥500k–¥750k figures are posting-level salary-range midpoint differences, not causal salary effects or final compensation outcomes.

Career evidence may increasingly shift from documents produced to stakeholders moved and outcomes delivered.

SOURCES

Primary sources and references

The ¥500k–¥750k figures compare medians of advertised salary-range midpoints for postings with versus without project-execution keywords. They are not final accepted-salary differences and do not establish a causal effect of execution skill on pay. The Axis survey is self-reported among workers who use AI at least monthly; the 54.4 percentage-point difference is associative, not causal. Preparation Cost ↓ → Bottleneck Downstream → Judgment → Coordination → Execution is Banseog's analytical frame.