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ZDNET's cardinal takeaways
- Demand for AI skills skyrocketed successful 2025, according to Upwork.
- AI is reshaping jobs much than it is replacing them.
- Employers could soon spot a higher premium connected freelancers.
The proliferation of precocious AI tools successful the workplace isn't resulting successful the wide occupation displacement that galore person feared -- not yet, anyway.
According to a caller study from freelance marketplace level Upwork, leader request for skills that, connected the surface, look astir susceptible to AI-driven automation, similar bundle improvement and lawsuit support, remained unchangeable successful 2025. At the aforesaid time, request for skills that absorption connected incorporating AI into companies' existing workflows has skyrocketed implicit the past year, Upwork's study found.
Also: More workers are utilizing AI than ever - they're besides trusting it less: Inside the vexation gap
As a whole, the findings suggest that portion businesses are investing much clip and resources successful adopting AI tools, they are simultaneously seeking skilled quality workers to oversee and negociate AI processes effectively.
"Our information shows that AI isn't erasing the request for quality work; it's clarifying wherever quality expertise matters most," Teng Liu, an economist astatine Upwork, said successful a statement. "Even arsenic AI capabilities grow rapidly, businesses proceed to put successful foundational skills and are consenting to wage a premium for endowment that brings creativity, judgment, and problem-solving into AI-enabled work."
Most in-demand AI skills
According to Upwork's data, each of which were gleaned from the company's tract implicit the people of 2025, request for nonrecreational skills that specifically notation AI grew by a cumulative magnitude of 109% compared to the erstwhile twelvemonth -- a beardown indicator that employers crossed industries are actively embracing AI tools, adjacent if they're not utilizing them to regenerate quality workers.
Demand for AI video procreation and editing skills saw the astir explosive growth, surging by good implicit 300% year-over-year. That was followed by request for AI integration (that is, weaving AI into existing workflows) and information annotation and labeling skills (an important portion of grooming AI models), which grew by 178% and 154%, respectively. AI representation procreation and editing skills saw a 95% summation successful demand, portion request for professionals with acquisition processing AI chatbots grew by 71%.
AI and the 'spectrum of transformation'
Upwork's caller study adds to a increasing assemblage of grounds indicating that, contempt its selling hype and accelerated method advances, existent AI systems person a agelong mode to spell earlier they tin wholly automate astir jobs.
Recent probe from occupation posting tract Indeed found that AI is overmuch much apt to alteration circumstantial aspects of jobs alternatively than regenerate them wholesale, successful ample portion due to the fact that each occupation is made up of a multitude of tasks, immoderate of which tin beryllium easy automated by AI and others which, successful contrast, inactive necessitate immoderate grade of quality oversight oregon carnal activity.
Seen successful this way, the occupation marketplace tin truthful beryllium said to beryllium on what the authors of the Indeed study telephone "a spectrum of transformation," with imaginable for automation determined by each role's peculiar melange of requisite skills.
Also: Nervous astir the occupation market? 5 ways to basal retired successful the property of AI
Similarly, a survey from Scale AI and the Center for AI Safety posted to the preprint server tract arXiv successful precocious October found that starring AI models similar Gemini 2.5 Pro and Claude Sonnet 4.5 are lone capable to grip the thinnest borderline of enactment that's required successful the emblematic scope of a freelance task -- since, again, this benignant of enactment requires a dynamic blend of skills.
The aboriginal is fractional
Each of these studies underscores the information that until a genuinely artificially mostly intelligent cause comes on -- and it's inactive precise overmuch up for statement whether oregon not that volition ever hap -- employers volition proceed to trust connected quality workers to grip astir roles, oregon astatine slightest astir aspects of those roles.
Adoption of AI could also, however, reshape the organizational operation wrong businesses. Another cardinal uncovering from Upwork's caller study is that implicit three-quarters (77%) of concern leaders that the institution surveyed said the exertion is causing them to absorption connected hiring much "fractional" workers than full-time employees. In different words, they're looking for much short-term oregon contract-based professionals to execute highly specialized tasks that can't easy beryllium automated.
The upshot is that arsenic AI becomes much commonplace, the skills and types of labour that employers worth the astir volition apt proceed to shift. "Demand for skilled radical hasn't disappeared," Upwork wrote successful its report, "it's being recomposed, with beardown grounds that the request for quality endowment endures successful a aboriginal of enactment that is broadly influenced by AI."
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