TL;DR

Employers advertised about 100,000 AI roles in the UK over the past six months, a 51% rise on the six months before, according to Accenture’s Tech Talent Tracker, reported by Computer Weekly on 16 October. London carried six times the AI listings of Liverpool, Leeds, Newcastle and Manchester combined. Accenture warns that this concentration could hold back UK growth as businesses outside the capital try to hire.

AI demand also lifted the wider tech jobs market, which grew 21% over the period, the tracker found.

The regional picture

Manchester’s tech hiring grew fastest, by 35%, passing 30,000 roles; Bristol (up 25%) and Birmingham (up 17%) followed. London’s tech listings rose 24% to over 250,000. About 1.75 million people, roughly two in three UK tech workers, is based in the capital, against 13% across the four northern cities.

Sam Holmes, who leads talent reinvention at Accenture UK, said AI “is not just the preserve of technology companies based in the capital”, and that firms in every sector and region would need the skills to stay competitive.

Supporting roles and a young talent pool

Jobs that help put AI to work are rising too. Cyber security vacancies climbed by nearly 20%, data analytics postings by 19% to around 90,000, and engineering and DevOps adverts by 11%, reaching 100,000. Accenture reads this as AI changing tech jobs, not shrinking demand for them.

The AI-skilled workforce skews junior. Four in ten people with AI skills have under six years of experience, and around a quarter have two years or fewer, so Accenture expects more companies to retrain experienced staff alongside specialist hiring.

Not everyone accepts the optimistic reading. Sam Kingston, chief executive of software services firm Zenitech, said the job gains will fall away as AI makes teams more efficient, with junior and mid-level staff affected first.

Looking forward

For businesses outside London, the numbers point to a hiring market where they compete with the capital for a largely early-career pool. In our view, the reskilling route Accenture describes is the more realistic option for most regional employers, and it sits awkwardly beside the Deloitte survey in which over half of UK CFOs expect AI to cut headcount within a year. Which of those trends wins out will shape whether the AI vacancy boom outlasts the experimentation phase.