The wider UK jobs market is cautious, and logistics feels it too. Recruiters report a subdued backdrop where employers are hiring carefully rather than at pace, according to the KPMG and REC UK Report on Jobs. That caution does not mean demand has gone away. It means employers are more selective about who they bring in, and clearer about the skills they actually need.
Across the economy, some sectors are still adding roles. Official figures show the largest volume increase in vacancies over August to October 2025 came in professional, scientific and technical activities, which rose by 5,000, per the ONS vacancies bulletin for November 2025. Logistics sits alongside these trends: as operations lean more on data and automation, the mix of roles is changing rather than shrinking as a whole.
There is a technology pull running underneath all of this. Demand for AI skills rose nearly 200% in a year, with London accounting for 80% of AI-related job postings, according to Accenture figures reported by The Register. Logistics is one of the sectors putting that capability to work, from demand forecasting to agent-led routing.
Agent-led routing hands the repeatable work to software: sequencing drops, balancing loads, re-planning around traffic and reacting to live constraints. That frees the dispatcher to focus on the calls a model struggles with. Which customer promise matters most today? When do you hold a vehicle back? How do you weigh a driver's local knowledge against the fastest route on paper? Those are judgement calls, and they get more valuable, not less, as the routine work is automated.
We are seeing the same pattern the tech sector has already lived through, where routine entry work thins out while specialist demand holds firm. Entry-level job postings in the UK have dropped by around 30% since ChatGPT launched, according to Adzuna data cited by techUK, and the tech sector cut graduate roles by 46% in a single year, per figures from the Institute of Student Employers reported by The Register. The lesson for logistics: protect the routes into the profession, because the experienced judgement you need in five years starts with the people you train today.
Apprenticeships offer one answer. In AI hiring, apprenticeships rose from 3% of hires in 2020 to 19% in 2025, according to the GOV.UK AI Labour Market Survey 2025. Logistics operators can use the same approach to build dispatch and planning talent that understands both the technology and the network it runs on.
Hire for the judgement that agents cannot replicate. That means people who can read exceptions quickly, weigh commercial trade-offs and explain a decision to a driver, a customer and a director in three different registers. Comfort with data matters too. Specialist skills in AI and data are the demand hotspots that recruiters expect to shape the market, according to Computer Weekly's tech recruitment outlook for 2026, and dispatch teams that can question a routing recommendation, rather than accept it blindly, will run tighter operations.
This is a shift from hiring for keystrokes to hiring for reasoning. The best dispatchers will supervise the agent, spot when its assumptions break and step in with context the system does not hold. Look for curiosity, calm under pressure and the ability to learn a new tool without fear of it.
Start with a job description that names the judgement, not just the tasks. Describe the decisions the person will own, the trade-offs they will face and the tools they will work alongside. That attracts people who want the responsibility and screens out those looking for a purely manual role that automation is already absorbing.
Then keep your process fast and fair. In a cautious market where employers are selective, good people still move quickly. Structure your interviews around real scenarios: give someone a messy routing problem and watch how they reason, not just what answer they land on. Widen your pool too. IT business analysts and systems designers are already in critical demand, according to the Occupations in Demand 2025 statistics on GOV.UK, and logistics competes for the same analytical minds. Look beyond the obvious backgrounds and be ready to train.
When you know the judgement you are hiring for, the task is finding the right person fast. That is where Reed.ai helps. Our recruitment agent manages recruitment end to end for 8% on a successful hire, with no monthly fee and no upfront cost. If you are building a dispatch team ready for agent-led routing, talk to us today and see who we can put in front of you.
