Most IT leaders entered 2025 with unfinished business around AI, a key enterprise priority. But before organizations can leverage the right AI tools — whether agentic, generative or anywhere in between – they need to have the right type of talent aboard.
Organizations boosted their efforts to reshape hiring strategies around their AI aspirations last year, with 4 in 10 leaders saying they planned to increase headcount in direct response to generative AI efforts, according to Deloitte.
For vastly undersupplied fields like data science and AI, refocusing plans is not enough.
"Finding these skilled professionals is a challenge," Seth Robinson, VP of industry research at CompTIA, told CIO Dive in December. "A lot of organizations are turning toward upskilling, reskilling and internal training."
The rapid pace of development in enterprise AI in recent years pushed businesses to hurry adoption plans, deploying the technology across back-office and customer-facing platforms. In response, businesses reworked their hiring and training strategies to solve for intractable skills gaps.
Enterprise efforts to attract AI-savvy workers was reflected in salary trends. Despite lagging salary growth in tech professions, workers with AI in their resumes commanded an 18% salary premium above their non-AI counterparts last year, according to data from tech hiring platform Dice.
At the start of 2024, roughly 1 in 10 jobs on Dice's platform required AI related-skills, according to Art Zeile, president and CEO of Dice parent company DHI. By the end of the year, it was nearly 1 in 3, he said.
Alongside increased hiring, enterprises have increased their budgets to align with AI priorities. But a dearth of workers to support efforts is leading executives to address the potential talent hurdles ahead.
A shift in operations
AI's deployment led businesses to reassess how they operated — including the automation of certain IT tasks and the need for increased personalization in customer-facing systems. The shifts have trickled down to the IT function, pushing leaders to stand up new units or revamp existing ones.
"AI teams were not part of every CIO organization, but now pretty much every CIO is investing enough in AI talent," said BlackLine CIO Sumit Johar. "I didn't have an AI team in my organization up until now."
Since AI relies so heavily on data, CIOs are also putting a sharper focus on the talent supporting their data estates.
"Data organizations are now being challenged because AI is able to consume so much of unstructured data that was hardly being used in the past," said Johar. "They're being asked to put checks and balances on how to manage unstructured data."
In addition to adapting operations to the challenges and opportunities of AI, the task at hand for CIOs is to identify and attract a tech worker who can take on new kinds of tasks.
"We all need more talent, more people, but we need a different type of talent," said C1 CIO Viral Tripathi. "Some of the talent needs to adapt and be really good at managing AI and AI agents."
Key training priorities
Pressed by the undersupply in key talent buckets, reskilling and training emerged as a key priority for CIOs.
"The big issue that we are all facing is that the demand for AI-based solutions is a lot more than the supply," Johar said.
IT leaders flagged talent development as a 2025 priority in an Info-Tech Research Group report released in December. More than one-third of survey respondents said cybersecurity and AI/ML were workforce development priorities.
As AI leads businesses to reevaluate the way they operate, existing workers must learn to adjust.
"With any new technology, any new change in the organization, people have to adapt," said Faisal Masud, president of HP Digital Services. "They have to get trained and understand their role and their significance as human beings."
Two-thirds of organizations plan to train employees this year in response to looming IT skills gaps in cybersecurity, software and data, up from 59% in 2024, according to CompTIA.
"As AI tools are able to perform certain rote tasks within an organization, that would free up more entry-level people who are lower on the rungs … to begin being upskilled and working on the more strategic roles within their organizations and projects," Carolyn April, VP of of research and market intelligence at Global Technology Industry Association, told CIO Dive in December.
AI knowledge matters in the business units that are working directly with the technology. But as consumers grow more familiar with AI-powered systems, AI skills become a broader imperative.
"It is my job to create awareness and training among my employees about the power of AI and what you can build with AI, but also equally important to make sure my entire CIO organization gets trained, whether they are building AI solutions or not," said Johar. "They still need to know where AI can make a difference."
