The skills premium
What AI and data skills are worth right now, in wages, hiring, and company growth.
62%
The average wage premium for AI skills has risen to 62%, based on analysis of more than one billion job advertisements across 27 countries.
8x
Jobs requiring specific AI skills are growing almost eight times faster than the overall job market, at 69% growth versus 9%.
52%
Companies most capable of using AI are growing headcount 52% faster than the least AI-exposed companies, and growing wages 24% versus 17%.
66%
66% of business leaders say they would not hire someone without AI literacy skills.
The readiness gap and the response
How far most workforces are from AI-ready, and the money now moving to close the gap.
47%
47% of leaders say upskilling employees in AI is their single top workforce strategy for the next 12 to 18 months.
77%
77% of enterprise leaders consider workforce AI skills an urgent need, yet only 7% have put Learning and Development teams in charge of AI training.
6x
Workers who have not received AI training are six times more likely to say AI makes them less productive rather than more.
23%
Only 23% of organisations say their workforce is ready for AI, down six points from 29% in 2025, even as 57% have broadly deployed AI in core processes.
52%
52% of senior leaders say it has become harder to find employees with the right skills to advance their AI strategy.
53%
IBM's 2026 CEO Study found 53% of employees will need upskilling to perform their current role effectively between 2026 and 2028, and another 29% will require reskilling for a different role.
83%
83% of CEOs say AI success depends more on human adoption than on technology capability, per IBM's 2026 CEO Study of 2,000 senior leaders across 33 countries.
$500M
RAISE US launched in June 2026 with more than $500 million secured from OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft, and Amazon toward a $1 billion target for retraining US workers displaced by AI.
How this page is maintained
Every statistic here comes from source-backed reporting in our news archive. Each stat carries the original publisher, a link to the source, and the date we verified it. We do not publish numbers we cannot trace.
The readiness gap is a solvable problem.
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