New Research Suggests More Than 50% Of AI Jobs In The UK Could Go Unfilled By 2028

These days, our lives are overrun by AI. It’s absolutely everywhere – from our personal lives, coming up with good recipes, helping us understand concepts and creating workout routines; to our professional lives, writing emails, drafting contracts and working out the best ways to get to work. But more than that, as a result, it feels as if suddenly everybody is working with or in AI in one way or another. Whether that’s introducing a new AI feature to an online platform or bringing it into a work flow in the office, we are simply drowning in AI “solutions”.

So why then are we being told that by 2028, more than half of the available “AI jobs” in the United Kingdom will be left unfilled? During a period in which it feels as though everybody is upskilling in tech and artificial intelligence and learning how to use it constructively, it seems odd to expect that there simply won’t be enough qualified professionals to hold technical AI jobs within the next couple of years.

Well, this is what research conducted by Robert Walters and Native Teams suggests, and naturally, we want to know more.

What Does the Report Tell Us?

First things first, let’s look at the report’s main findings. Here are the key numbers worth looking considering:

• There are 10 “origin markets” that account for 66.5% of all global hiring – that is, the US, the UK, Germany, Spain, India, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Australia, Canada and the UAE.
• Nearly half, 48.9%, of all global hiring flows through these 10 countries, in one way or another.
• 40.9% perceent of this global hiring flow is from Europe to Europe.
• About 40% of all these roles are for senior employees or those in leadership positions.
• All 10 of the top origin markets hire from destinations that that allow them to make up to 68% of cost savings.
• The UK is the second largest consumer of global talent, behind only the US.

There’s a lot to take in there, but in short: Europe is absolutely dominating the global hiring space on the whole, but the UK is very closely following in its consumption of global talent.

So why is that and what does it does this mean?

The Takeaway: The UK Isn’t Producing Enough AI Talent, So It’s Looking Elsewhere

Basically, the UK is hiring a lot of Europeans, especially in the AI space. But that begs the question: why is the country looking elsewhere when it could be producing top talent at home?

Well, according to the report, the problem is that while people and employees in the UK are using AI gor more basic tasks – more in the sense of shadow AI utilisation – they’re not gaining much experience and expertise in more complex things like machine learning, model deployment, AI infrastructure and more.

But naturally, the demand for employeees who are AI native – and not only native, but experienced in higher level AI expertise – is increasing rapidly as the gap between basic AI and “expert” AI rapidly grows on a daily basis. And the fact is, according to the report, while the UK is expected to have a demand for about 300,000 AI professionals by 2028, it’s only going to be producing closer to 138,000, less than  half.

According to Phill Brown, Global Head of Market Intelligence at Robert Walters believes that, “The scale of projected demand for AI talent is expected to significantly outpace domestic supply growth in many advanced economies, including the UK.

“Historically, major advances in technology only translated into meaningful productivity growth once organisations had the workforce capability to implement them at scale. The same dynamic is now emerging with AI, where access to experienced talent will play a defining role in how quickly businesses can convert investment into measurable economic output.”

So, while organisations around the UK are focusing on increasing investment in AI and automation technology in an attempt to become more efficient and competitive in global markets, what they haven’t quite been doing is keeping up with training people how to work with complex and high-level AI. Thus, they’re forced to look elsewhere for professionals who can.

Which Roles Are the Most Challenging To Fill?

The burning question is, what types of AI experts are in the least supply and highest demand in the UK?

According to Robert Walters and Native Teams, these are the hardest to fill roles:

• AI/ML engineers
• Cybersecurity specialists
• Cloud/Dev. Ops. Developers
• Data Engineers

Thus, these are the roles they’re struggling fill by means of UK domestic hiring and are, as a result looking elsewhere
– mostly to Europe, but to the rest of the world too.

What Should We Take Away From This?

It kind of depends on who you are, what role is and what skin you have in the game. But from what I can see, there are a few main conclusions – one for job seekers and one for those hiring.

For the former, it’s quickly becoming incredibly important to upskill in AI expertise, but not just basic, lower-level stuff – we’re talking about specialist knowledge. According to the report, AI has (and still is) created signifcant demand for the roles we mentioned above, as well as AI security specialists and experts in AI ethics and governance. Ultimately, the more specialised your knowledge, experience and understanding, the better.

With regard to the latter, whether companies want to be hiring domestically or not, the current numbers and skills development trajectory indicates that it is soon going to be absolutely imperative that companies are able to and are actively hiring global talent.

According to Jack Thorogood, CEO of Native Teams, “Many businesses in the UK are already investing in AI, but access to experienced talent is one of the main constraints on how quickly those systems can be implemented operationally.

Thus, “Expanding AI hiring outside of domestic labour markets could help lift UK productivity growth by between 0.5 and 1.5 percentage points annually, by helping organisations scale AI capability more quickly and reduce deployment delays linked to talent shortages.”

“The supporting infrastructure behind it (global payroll, work payments, and compliance systems) has widely matured over the past few years, making global hiring far more practical at scale.

“Organisations are now able to access critical AI capability more quickly and respond faster to changing technology demands, while also creating greater access to worldwide opportunities for professionals.”

Ultimately, UK businesses need to be able to tap into global hiring markets, and now, the infrastructure exists to be able to do just that, making global hiring possible and incredibly effective and successful.

The most important message from this report, and from Robert Walters and Native Teams, is that being able to properly tap into global markets and hire from international talent pools will be absolutely vital in remaining competitive.

Perhaps the UK will improve its AI training and it will become possible for businesses to hire more advanced AI experts in future. But for now, access to global talent pools is absolutely vital.