Artificial intelligence to drive the next generation of jobs

The uptake of artificial intelligence by businesses will transform the UK job market in the near future and will create around 133 million new jobs worldwide. The findings come from a new report called Harnessing the Power of AI: The Demand for Future Skills (registration) from recruiter Robert Walters and market analysts Vacancy Soft.

The report claims that in the UK alone, up to a third of jobs will be automated or likely to change as a result of the emergence of AI – impacting 10.5 million workers.Demand for Data Professionals

IT professionals dedicated to data management appear to be the fastest growing area within large or global entities, with volumes increasing ten-fold in three years – an increase in vacancies of 160 percent since 2015. More generally, data roles across the board have increased by 80 percent since 2015 – with key areas of growth including data scientists and engineers.

What has been the most interesting to see is the emergence of data scientist as a mainstream profession – with job vacancies increasing by a staggering 110 percent year-on-year. The same trend can be seen with data engineers, averaging 86 percent year-on-year job growth.

New roles

The rise of cybercrime has resulted in professional services – particularly within banking and financial services – hiring aggressively for information security professionals since 2016, however since then volumes have held steady.

Within professional services, vacancies for data analysts (+19.5 percent), data manager (+64.2 percent), data scientist (+28.8), and data engineer (+62 percent) have all increased year-on-year.

According to the report, the top industries already investing in AI are:

1. Agriculture
2. Business Support
3. Customer Experience
4. Energy
5. Healthcare
6. Intellectual Property
7. IT Service Management
8. Manufacturing
9. Technical Support
10. Retail
11. Software Development

Ollie Sexton, Principal at Robert Walters comments: “As businesses become ever more reliant on AI, there is an increasing amount of pressure on the processes of data capture and integration. As a result, we have seen an unprecedented number of roles being created with data skill-set at their core.

“Our job force cannot afford to not get to grips with data and digitalisation. Since 2015 the volume of data created worldwide has more than doubled – increasing (on average) by 28 percent year-on-year. Now is the perfect time to start honing UK talent for the next generation of AI-influenced jobs. If you look at the statistics in this report we can see that demand is already rife, what we are at risk of is a shortage of talent and skills.”