Demand for AI skills is climbing fast. 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 The Register (Accenture data). That tells you two things: the race for AI talent is real, and it is heavily concentrated. If you are building a commissioning team outside the capital, you are competing in a thinner market and need to plan for it.
The wider picture is cautious but selective. Against a subdued 2025 economic backdrop, businesses took a cautious approach to hiring but there were demand hotspots for specialist tech skills including AI, data, enterprise applications and cyber security Computer Weekly (tech recruitment outlook 2026). In other words, budgets are tight, yet the skills that make AI projects work are exactly the ones employers are still chasing.
Government is trying to widen the pipeline too. During London Tech Week 2025, the UK government 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. That scale of investment should ease the squeeze over time, but it does not fill your open roles this quarter.
A commissioning team sits between the business problem and the working AI system. It scopes what to build, decides what good looks like, tests outputs and holds suppliers to account. That calls for people who can translate between users, data and technology, not only engineers.
The demand data backs this up. IT business analysts, architects and systems designers (193k workers) are among the occupations in critical demand, with 3 out of 5 indicators in critical demand in 2025 Occupations in demand 2025, Explore Education Statistics, GOV.UK. These are the analyst and architecture roles a commissioning team leans on most, so expect competition for them.
Entry routes are changing shape as well. Apprenticeships have risen from 3% of AI hires in 2020 to 19% in 2025 GOV.UK / DSIT – AI Labour Market Survey 2025 report. That gives you a second lever: grow some of the team through apprenticeships rather than buying every skill on the open market.
And the pressure is not going away soon. Occupations in Digital, Adult Social Care, Construction and Engineering have the greatest additional employment demand between 2025 and 2030 GOV.UK - Assessment of priority skills to 2030 (Skills England). Digital demand runs for years, so treat each open role as part of a five-year plan, not a one-off fill.
Start with the work, not the job titles. Write down the decisions this team must own: what to commission, how to measure success, how to test a model's output, and when to say no. Then shape each open role around those decisions. A clear scope attracts the right people and filters out the wrong ones.
Mix buy and build. Buy the scarce architecture and analyst skills that are in critical demand Occupations in demand 2025, Explore Education Statistics, GOV.UK, and build the rest through apprenticeships, which now make up a fifth of AI hires GOV.UK / DSIT – AI Labour Market Survey 2025 report. That spreads your risk and keeps the team affordable to grow.
Look beyond London. With 80 percent of AI-related job postings concentrated in the capital The Register (Accenture data), regional and remote hiring widens your pool and softens the competition. Be specific in every advert about the problem the person will solve, and move quickly once you find a good match, because strong people do not stay on the market long.
Finally, hire in sequence. Bring in a lead who can define standards first, then the analysts and architects, then the people you are developing. Each hire should make the next one easier to brief and quicker to onboard.
When you know the roles you need, we help you fill them. We search 15 million candidates and run recruitment end to end, from a ranked shortlist to interviews booked, so you can focus on scoping the work rather than sifting CVs. Our recruitment agent manages recruitment end to end for 8% on a successful hire, with no monthly fee and no upfront cost. Tell Reed.ai the first open role on your commissioning team and we will start building your shortlist today.
