Very busy, and getting busier. Demand for AI skills increased nearly 200 percent in a year, with London accounting for 80 percent of AI-related job postings and nearly two-thirds of all technology vacancies in the UK according to Accenture data reported by The Register. That's a fast market, and it shapes how hard it is to find the right person.
The shape of the workforce is shifting too. Apprenticeships have risen from 3% of AI hires in 2020 to 19% in 2025 in the GOV.UK AI Labour Market Survey 2025, a sign that employers are now building talent as well as buying it. And the government has announced a partnership to upskill 7.5 million UK workers in essential AI skills by 2030, equivalent to around 20% of the UK workforce techUK reports from London Tech Week 2025.
Over the longer term, the scale is striking. For the total of AI-related occupations, the net change ranges from approximately 696,000 jobs in the Automation Scenario to 1,072,000 in the Technological Opportunities Scenario, with replacement demand rising from 3,077,000 to 3,193,000 jobs across these scenarios in the GOV.UK AI skills labour market projections. In a market that big, measuring what each hire actually delivers matters more than ever.
The hard part isn't posting a role, it's filling it well. The proportion of employers struggling to fill vacancies has declined, but a comparison with the Cyber Security Skills 2024 report showed 70% of cyber firms reported at least one hard-to-fill vacancy in the GOV.UK AI Labour Market Survey 2025. Scarcity in adjacent technical fields tells you something: the roles that move AI-transformation are rarely interchangeable.
A modern transformation team mixes people who build, people who deploy and people who govern. Engineers and data specialists create the models and pipelines. Product and delivery people turn that work into outcomes users feel. And a growing layer of apprentices and trainees, now a far larger share of AI hires than five years ago per the GOV.UK AI Labour Market Survey 2025, keeps the team learning rather than just shipping.
The value of any one hire depends on how they lift the people around them. A strong engineer who unblocks a team is worth more than a brilliant one who works alone. So when you measure good, measure the ripple, not just the role.
Start with the outcome, not the title. Write down the one or two business results the hire is meant to move: a faster model deployment, a cleaner data pipeline, a product metric that shifts. Then design every stage of the process to test for those results. If you can't say what good looks like in six months, you can't measure it later.
Good measurement is honest about what you can't see on a CV. Judgement, curiosity and the habit of sharing knowledge rarely show up in a keyword match, yet they drive most of the long-term value. Build interviews that surface those traits, then keep checking them once the person is in the seat.
When you know the outcome you want, the job is finding the right person fast, then making the hire worth it. We search a database of 15 million candidates to surface people matched to the role and the result you need, and we manage the process end to end so you can focus on judging impact rather than chasing CVs. Our recruitment agent manages recruitment end to end for 8% on a successful hire, with no monthly fee and no upfront cost. Ready to hire for the good a person actually does with Reed.ai? Tell us the outcome you want to move, and we'll surface a shortlist.
