AI hiring is no longer just a tech story

Tech companies started first, but non-tech is catching up fast

The share of AI-related jobs on our platform has surged since 2023 for both tech and non-tech firms. But we’re now seeing faster growth in AI jobs in non-tech companies. The share of AI jobs in these companies (what economists call the ‘intensive’ margin¹) has jumped by more than a third. Non-tech firms started from a much lower base, which may partly explain the acceleration.
The share of companies with at least one new AI job is up more than a third across the platform. That’s the extensive margin, and it’s telling the opposite story from the intensive one. Here, tech companies are leading the pack, but growth in 2025 is high amongst every subset of companies that I looked at – SMBs, mid-market/enterprise firms, tech firms, non-tech firms, and every combination of the above. SMBs are growing faster than larger firms, with SMB tech firms showing the fastest growth. In a sense, our data suggests that AI jobs are becoming more distributed than before.

We’re also seeing lots of growth in some interesting new roles, like AI librarian or AI tutor, signaling that AI expertise is expanding beyond traditional engineering functions.

English-speaking markets dominate, but high-wage markets are competing

The U.S. is the top hiring market for AI talent on Deel, followed by India, Canada, and the UK. Clearly, English-speaking countries still have an advantage.

But when looking at top-paid AI talent, Switzerland, one of the highest-wage countries in Europe, joins the U.S. and UK at the top. Personally, I’m not surprised by the relatively high wages of British AI talent nor the strong showing of Canadian workers. Canada’s combination of location, cultural alignment with the U.S., and competitive wages makes it an obvious expansion market for American companies.

I’ve long suspected that tech talent employed by global companies in the UK is among the highest-paid in the world, despite the fact that UK workers overall are paid less than their counterparts in countries like Australia, Canada, Denmark, or Germany. This data suggests that view may have a ring of truth to it.

AI hiring skews young

AI workers increasingly fill roles in small and medium companies, tech and non-tech, across the U.S. and Europe. But one way in which they’re decidedly not diverse: age. Nearly half (42%) of AI roles on our platform are filled by workers aged 25-34. That share stays constant even after removing AI roles in tech firms and is significantly higher than we see across Deel as a whole.

While it’s hard to say yet if it’s a result of decreased demand in tech or increased demand elsewhere, there’s no doubt that the diffusion of AI hiring across sectors and geographies reflects a broader economic shift. As AI capabilities become more accessible, expect to see more applications of AI in your everyday life. But the age skew we see suggests that most of our AI talent is being concentrated among relatively recent graduates – and that could mean a clash as relatively older management cohorts are being asked to manage the rollout of a technology that they don’t fully understand.

I hope you’ll read the report, as there’s a lot more than just Deel data in there. It dives into the findings for 2025 and beyond, from the policy shift in AI to new local regulations on AI. Personally, I’m pretty interested to see how the introduction of self-driving cars to the London market next year turns out …

Footnotes

1. The extensive margin is whether or not someone participates in a market. The intensive margin is how much someone participates, conditional on having participated. In this case, extensive margin - whether a company has an AI job. Intensive = how many AI jobs they have. ↩