Dive Brief:
- Roles for developers with AI skills have skyrocketed in the last five years, far outpacing demand for non-AI roles and underscoring the scale of enterprise adoption, a Randstad Digital report published Tuesday found.
- Based on an analysis of 35 million global job postings since 2021, AI-augmented roles for software development jumped nearly 600%. By comparison, traditional developer roles increased just 28% in the same period, the talent services firm found.
- In shaping their talent strategies, businesses are increasingly putting the spotlight on trust. Randstad Digital found AI trainers, who work to guarantee model reliability and trustworthy outputs, was the fastest-growing position globally, increasing nearly 300% in five years.
Dive Insight:
While AI-attributed layoffs pervaded headlines in recent weeks, AI adoption is leading to increased hiring in specific categories.
Nearly one-quarter of roles for software developers in the U.S. and the U.K. now require expertise in AI as organizations grapple with lengthy hiring cycles, Randstad said. More than a half million tech job postings are open in the U.S., according to CompTIA.
Leaders aiming to support widespread adoption in their organizations should look more closely at talent strategies, said Michael Morris, global head of platform and talent at Randstad Digital.
“The technology and the process are almost never our problem, we can get through those two,” Morris told CIO Dive in May. “People transformation is almost always the one that's lagging, the one that takes the most effort and the most time.”
Amid the retool in talent strategies, two concerns are top of mind for CIOs: the implications of agentic AI and the increase in cybersecurity risk.
Agentic AI represents a key investment priority this year for half of software engineering teams, according to SoftServe data. But despite efforts to widen agentic AI use for coding, businesses report struggling with the effects of integration and the cost of compute.
Security teams are also concerned about the potential for AI-written code vulnerabilities. ProjectDiscovery, a security provider, found nearly 60% of security practitioners struggle to keep up with the volume of AI-written code.
