Demand For Ai Skills Surged By Over 100% In 2025, Upwork Finds - Here's How It Could Affect Your Job Search

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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 devices successful nan workplace isn't resulting successful nan wide occupation displacement that galore person feared -- not yet, anyway.

According to a caller study from freelance marketplace level Upwork, employer request for skills that, connected nan surface, look astir susceptible to AI-driven automation, for illustration package improvement and customer support, remained unchangeable successful 2025. At nan aforesaid time, request for skills that attraction connected incorporating AI into companies' existing workflows has skyrocketed complete nan past year, Upwork's study found.

Also: More workers are utilizing AI than ever - they're besides trusting it less: Inside nan vexation gap

As a whole, nan findings propose that while 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 nan 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 salary a premium for talent 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 nan company's tract complete nan people of 2025, request for master skills that specifically mention AI grew by a cumulative magnitude of 109% compared to nan erstwhile twelvemonth -- a beardown parameter that employers crossed industries are actively embracing AI tools, moreover if they're not utilizing them to switch quality workers.

Demand for AI video procreation and editing skills saw nan astir explosive growth, surging by good complete 300% year-over-year. That was followed by request for AI integration (that is, weaving AI into existing workflows) and information note and labeling skills (an important portion of training AI models), which grew by 178% and 154%, respectively. AI image procreation and editing skills saw a 95% summation successful demand, while request for professionals pinch acquisition processing AI chatbots grew by 71%.

AI and nan 'spectrum of transformation'

Upwork's caller study adds to a increasing assemblage of grounds indicating that, contempt its trading hype and accelerated method advances, existent AI systems person a agelong measurement to spell earlier they tin wholly automate astir jobs.

Recent investigation from occupation posting tract Indeed found that AI is overmuch much apt to toggle shape circumstantial aspects of jobs alternatively than switch them wholesale, successful ample portion because each occupation is made up of a multitude of tasks, immoderate of which tin beryllium easy automated by AI and others which, successful contrast, still require immoderate grade of quality oversight aliases beingness activity. 

Seen successful this way, nan occupation marketplace tin truthful beryllium said to beryllium on what nan authors of nan Indeed study telephone "a spectrum of transformation," pinch imaginable for automation wished by each role's peculiar melange of requisite skills.

Also: Nervous astir nan occupation market? 5 ways to guidelines retired successful nan property of AI

Similarly, a study from Scale AI and nan Center for AI Safety posted to nan preprint server tract arXiv successful precocious October found that starring AI models for illustration Gemini 2.5 Pro and Claude Sonnet 4.5 are only capable to grip nan thinnest separator of activity that's required successful nan emblematic scope of a freelance task -- since, again, this benignant of activity requires a move blend of skills.

The early is fractional

Each of these studies underscores nan truth that until a genuinely artificially mostly intelligent supplier comes on -- and it's still very overmuch up for statement whether aliases not that will ever hap -- employers will proceed to trust connected quality workers to grip astir roles, aliases astatine slightest astir aspects of those roles.

Adoption of AI could also, however, reshape nan organizational building wrong businesses. Another cardinal uncovering from Upwork's caller study is that complete three-quarters (77%) of business leaders that nan institution surveyed said nan exertion is causing them to attraction connected hiring much "fractional" workers than full-time employees. In different words, they're looking for much short-term aliases contract-based professionals to execute highly specialized tasks that can't easy beryllium automated.

The upshot is that arsenic AI becomes much commonplace, nan skills and types of labour that employers worth nan astir will apt proceed to shift. "Demand for skilled group hasn't disappeared," Upwork wrote successful its report, "it's being recomposed, pinch beardown grounds that nan request for quality talent endures successful a early of activity that is broadly influenced by AI."