AI experts are set for a boom in job vacancies: up 69% by 2025

Specific or transferable skills. Roles that are disappearing and roles that are emerging. A redefinition of organisational processes. There is no doubt that artificial intelligence is rapidly changing the way we work, but above all it is radically reshaping the labour market. How? By accelerating the demand for advanced skills, increasing the value placed on creativity and leadership, and rewarding companies that adopt it strategically. This is what emerges from PwC’s AI Jobs Barometer 2026, based on an analysis of over one billion job advertisements across 27 countries, provided by Lightcast (a platform that aggregates information from job advertisements). The unit of analysis for this barometer is therefore the individual job advert, not the company. For Italia, the sample comprises 18.4 million job adverts.

According to the report, ‘professionalised’ roles requiring a high level of technical specialisation – that is, those in which AI automates routine tasks and allows specialists to focus on tasks with greater added value – are seeing a twice the growth in job opportunities and a 42% faster rise in salaries compared to “democratised” roles, in which AI makes tasks more accessible even to less experienced candidates. Job advertisements for roles requiring AI skills, such as prompt engineering or machine learning, continue to grow rapidly, at a rate approximately eight times higher (69%) than the overall labour market (9%). This growth rate is almost double that of 2024. To measure this indicator, PwC defines an ‘AI-related job advert’ as any advert requiring at least one skill linked to artificial intelligence according to Lightcast’s AI skills taxonomy, which comprises 405 skills (for example, skills in areas such as machine learning, generative artificial intelligence and large language models).

The sectors categorised as technology, media and telecommunications (11 per cent) and professional services (6 per cent) account for the largest share of growth in AI roles, followed by financial services (5 per cent), whilst the healthcare sector sits at the opposite end of the spectrum (less than 1%). As for roles, the prevalence of AI-related skills is highest in those with greater digital intensity, particularly in IT and computer science professions, marketing and communications, scientific research, and creative activities linked to design and content production, where the highest levels of AI penetration in job postings are observed. This shows that the impact of artificial intelligence does not therefore depend solely on the sector in question, but also on the nature of the activities carried out. In entry-level roles, AI appears to be increasing the demand for skills typically associated with senior levels, even amongst junior candidates. Job vacancies for these ‘seniorised’ entry-level roles have grown by 35 per cent since 2019, whilst vacancies for other entry-level roles have fallen by 10 per cent.

In Italia, job advertisements requiring skills related to artificial intelligence have increased by around 24,000 in just one year, bringing the proportion of AI roles to 1.7 per cent of all published advertisements. This means that, in an international comparison, Italy now ranks on a par with the leading European economies, but still lags behind the countries at the forefront of AI skills development. The proportion of job adverts requiring skills related to artificial intelligence stands at 2.2% in the United Kingdom and 2.8% in the United States, whilst in the major Asian markets it reaches 6.4% in China and 8.1% in India. As for sectors, Tech, Media & Telecom is the one with the highest intensity of AI recruitment: over 8% of job adverts published in 2025 require AI skills, followed by professional services (3.4%) and manufacturing (1.9%), whilst financial services remain at more modest levels (around 1.5%). However, when looking at job roles, growth between 2024 and 2025 is concentrated in digital and analytical roles, but also extends to non-tech areas. This hypothetical ranking is led by Systems Analysts (+3,086 job adverts), followed by Mathematicians/Actuaries/Statisticians (+2,796), Software Developers (+2,403), Web/Multimedia Developers (+715), Sales/Marketing Managers (+614), Sales Representatives (+576), ICT Managers (+493), Marketing/Advertising (+492), Graphic Designers (+395), and finally Industrial Engineers (+361).

What is becoming abundantly clear is that AI will continue to spread beyond specialist technical roles, permeating broader business functions. The fundamental shift will not simply be that companies will hire more ‘AI specialists’, but rather that an increasing number of roles may require a certain degree of familiarity with artificial intelligence.