Demand for AI skills is climbing fast. Over the last year it rose by nearly 200 percent, according to The Register, citing Accenture data, with London accounting for 80 percent of AI-related job postings and nearly two-thirds of all technology vacancies in the UK.
That pull sits on top of a cautious wider market. Businesses took a careful approach to hiring through a subdued 2025, but there were clear demand hotspots for specialist tech skills including AI, data, enterprise applications and cyber security, as set out in Computer Weekly's tech recruitment outlook for 2026.
The security side of the picture is tight too. The UK cyber security workforce stands at roughly 143,000 people, with growth moderately accelerating from 2 percent in 2022 to 5 percent in 2024, according to the government's Cyber security skills in the UK labour market 2025 report. That is steady, but it is not keeping pace with what autonomous systems now ask of teams.
Agentic systems act on their own. They plan, make decisions and take steps towards a goal with limited human prompting. In defence and security, that raises the stakes: a system that acts has to be constrained, tested and monitored before it ever touches a live environment.
So the roles in demand are not only model builders. Employers want safety engineers who design guardrails, red-teamers who try to break systems before anyone else does, assurance specialists who prove behaviour against a standard, and human-in-the-loop designers who keep a person in control of consequential decisions. These skills overlap with the AI, data and cyber security hotspots flagged in Computer Weekly's 2026 outlook, but they add a safety-first mindset on top.
The competition is real. With AI demand up nearly 200 percent in a year per The Register's reporting of Accenture data, defence and security teams are hiring from the same shallow pool as everyone else, often against London-weighted demand.
Start with the behaviour you want, not the tool. Write the role around the safety outcomes: who owns the guardrails, who signs off that a system is fit to deploy, who keeps a human in the loop. That clarity attracts people who think in risks and consequences, not just features.
Then widen the net. The cyber security workforce is growing at only 5 percent a year, according to the government's 2025 labour market report, so screening for an exact title will leave you empty-handed. Look for adjacent experience: safety-critical systems, assurance, test engineering, incident response. Many of these people already think the right way about failure.
Move quickly and assess for judgement. Ask people how they would stop a system doing the wrong thing, how they would test for edge cases, how they would escalate. In a market where demand has jumped nearly 200 percent in a year per Accenture data reported by The Register, a slow process loses the people you most want.
We search 15 million candidates to find people who match the safety outcomes you care about, then manage the process end to end: shortlisting, contacting and booking interviews. 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 or overseeing agentic systems, start with Reed.ai today and see who we surface.
