UK struggling to keep pace with demand for specialist AI agent talent
A new report from Malt claims that demand for expertise running AI Agents has increased rapidly in the last year. At the same time, however, the growth of these skills among UK’s workforce does not seem to be keeping pace – at around half the rate.
For years now, the hype around artificial intelligence has (at least partially) been driven by the fantasy held by many shareholders and bosses, that they might be able to eliminate human salaries from their balance sheet. This hinged on the apparently limitless potential for AI to be able to do previously human work on its own – and the idea companies supplying the technology would continue to provide it for next to free out of their own benevolence.
2026 has seen a spectacular shattering of that set of beliefs, though. As AI giants such as Anthropic and OpenAI sought to appease their own investors, they shifted some services away from flat-rate subscriptions toward usage-based billing. With some firms blowing through their annual budget for research in a matter of weeks, thanks to this move, many firms have quietly begun re-evaluating the situation – and admitting the so called ‘jobs apocalypse’ associated with AI will have to be deferred, for now at least.
New research from Malt – a global network of thousands of freelance workers – further shows that human talent is back on the agenda for bosses across Europe, as they struggle to make the most of their sizeable investments in agentic AI.
According to the 2026 Tech Trends report, which surveyed Malt’s platform of one million freelancers, the AI Engineer freelancer community grew by 229% in the last 12 months. Furthermore, demand for AI agents increased 60x year-over-year, searches for AI agents increased 26x and agentic framework demand rose 62%.
The proponents of agentic AI have previously claim that unlike other forms of AI, which approximate the best answers to questions with a fresh series of tokens after each prompt, agentic systems can ‘learn’, ‘reason’, and ‘act autonomously’ to ‘solve’ complex, multistep problems. In theory, this enables a model to refine its decision-making over time, leading to improved outcomes. However, bosses have found that using it has been much more difficult than simply plugging in the technology and letting it get to work – and that has resulted in a 5,8000% boom in demand for workers with expertise in utilising AI agents in their own engagements.
Among freelancers often brought in to cover such skill gaps, supply is not growing at the same rate, however. This could lead to major issues down the line for employers – as Malt’s survey found that while it topped the ‘growing skills’ list of freelancers, this expanse was ‘only’ 2,420% – less than half the rate of demand.
Without knowing what the base for either sets of growth were, it is hard to say what such meteoric growth actually means practically. However, in spite of their popularity in “growing skills” declared by freelancers, AI agent skills were still not in the “top skills” declared by freelancers outright. These were headed by JavaScript and WordPress – which despite falling slightly in popularity, accounted for more than 7% of all skills declared. Meanwhile, AI-related skills did not even make the list. But one thing that is for sure: if employers want to make the most of AI and agentic AI, the AI job apocalypse of a post-human workplace remains an impossibility.
Luke Hicks, UK Country Lead and VP of Enterprise at Malt, said, “History, data, and observation show us that the AI job apocalypse is not yet here, but the fear is real and needs to be understood… CEOs need to be imaginative, change org charts and processes, admit they are not omniscient, take risks, and invest in training. Schools and universities also face the challenge of teaching soft skills: how to adapt to life and work in a more uncertain world, as we can only harness top-tier AI talent if we understand how to adapt to change.”
