Correction, 10 July 2026. The original version of this post claimed Indonesian IT job posts mention AI 28x less often than global remote roles. That was wrong. Two people left comments asking careful questions about the method, I went to check, and the number didn’t survive. Here’s the whole thing.
The number came from nowhere
What I published: 0.3% of Indonesian listings (3 of 1,039) carried an AI signal in the title, against 8.6% of global remote listings (216 of 2,517).
Neither figure exists in the article this post says it was drawn from. That article counts 1,039 local and 1,010 global — not 2,517 — and the words “28x”, “8.6%” and “0.3%” appear nowhere in it. The multiplier got invented somewhere between the article and this post, and I never checked it against the source.
It gets worse. The May 2026 raw pull behind those counts was never saved, so nobody can re-derive them. Not you, not me.
And the CSV I linked at the bottom of the original post, as evidence? It contains 18 AI-titled roles out of 478. That’s 3.8%, not 0.3%. Three of them are titled, plainly, AI Engineer. Another is Agentic AI Engineer. Anyone who downloaded the file I offered them would have seen my own data contradicting my own headline. Nobody did, which tells you something about how far a good number travels before anyone opens the spreadsheet.
What the data actually says
Same title scan, run properly over both sides:
Pool n AI in title Indonesian IT (JobStreet + Loker.id, Jun 2026) 478 3.8% Global remote, tech titles (Contra, WWR, RemoteOK, HN, Adzuna, The Muse) 1,035 19.5%5.2x. Real, but a different animal from 28x.
Valentin asked whether I was measuring two countries or two job boards. Mostly the boards. Watch what happens if I don’t hold role type constant, and compare Indonesian IT listings against the entire global pool — sales, support, ops and all: 3.8% against 6.2% of 3,318 listings. The gap falls to 1.6x.
One decision about what to compare moves the answer more than threefold. That was his point, and he was right to make it.
Where the gap actually lives
Luis asked where it concentrates. It turns out: not evenly, and not where I’d have guessed.
Family Indonesia Global remote Data / ML 0% (n=11) 23.7% (n=59) Fullstack 13.0% (n=23) 11.4% (n=70) DevOps / Cloud 0% (n=18) 2.1% (n=95) Senior / lead titles 2.6% (n=151) 17.4% (n=391)Inside ordinary engineering titles the gap mostly isn’t there. Fullstack actually flips — Indonesian fullstack roles put AI in the title slightly more often than global ones do. DevOps is a rounding error on both sides.
What Indonesia is missing is dedicated data/ML titles existing at all, and AI language in senior titles: 2.6% against 17.4%.
Luis called this before I did. He said the story was signal visibility — that employers use titles to position against competitors, not only to describe work. That is precisely where the gap sits: in the roles companies use to posture, not in the roles that describe the daily job. An Indonesian fullstack dev and a global one are advertised as doing much the same work.
Several of those Indonesian cells are under n=25. Directional, not settled.
What’s still wrong with this
- I still haven’t held the channel constant. A remote-first aggregator self-selects for AI-forward startups in a way JobStreet doesn’t. That’s Valentin’s real question and I can’t answer it yet — I’d need Indonesian remote-first listings from a comparable board.
- The snapshots don’t line up. Indonesian side is June; global side is today.
- Title-only. A team can be neck-deep in AI and never say so in a title. This measures advertising, not adoption. The original post admitted that, then ran a headline that ignored it.
- No random sampling, no confidence intervals.
The Indonesian figures come from the public CSV below — go check my arithmetic. The global figures come from a snapshot of my own corpus. That title-level export is up: <a href="https://lokerdollar.com/data/ai-title-gap-
%0Aaggregate-2026-07.csv” target=”_blank” rel=”noopener noreferrer”>global + Indonesia title-level export, ledgered.
The part worth keeping
A number that flatters the thing you already wanted to say is the one to check twice. 28x made a much better headline than 5x. That is exactly why it sailed through.
Thanks to Valentin Monteiro and Luis. The correction is theirs.
Free datasets (CSV, no signup): Indonesian IT — replicated · Global remote — preview
Underlying six findings: Indonesia IT vs Global Remote
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