If you're an IT developer and still don't have any AI tools in your resume — the market is starting to notice. According to the Djinni platform, from May 2025 to May 2026, the number of job vacancies for developers where employers directly require artificial intelligence skills increased by 73%.
An even more telling picture emerges in creative specialties — designers, copywriters, UX professionals. The equivalent indicator there reached 110%. In other words, every second new vacancy in this segment already includes AI as a mandatory or desired requirement.
What Changed
A year ago, AI in job postings mostly appeared as "would be a plus." Now the wording is shifting to "mandatory" or "experience with LLM/Copilot/Stable Diffusion." This is not a cosmetic change in descriptions — it's a signal that employers have begun filtering out candidates based on this criterion already at the resume screening stage.
Djinni also records the flip side: the number of candidates who list AI skills in their profile is growing slower than demand. Put simply, supply is not keeping up with demand — and this is already pushing salary expectations upward for those who have such skills.
Ukrainian Realities
For the Ukrainian IT market, which lost part of its junior talent after 2022 due to mobilization and emigration, this trend has a dual effect. On one hand, specialists with AI competencies gain a competitive advantage on international platforms. On the other — companies that don't restructure their hiring and training processes risk facing a staffing gap sooner than expected.
There is a specific fork in the road here: retraining existing specialists within companies or hunting for ready-made candidates on the open market. The first path is cheaper but requires time and investment in training. The second is more expensive, and competition for such people is already high.
For now, most Ukrainian IT companies are choosing the second option — and that's precisely why Djinni's statistics look the way they do.
The question is not whether AI will become a standard requirement in job postings — it already is. The question is whether companies will manage to build internal retraining programs before competition for ready-made AI specialists finally pushes them out of this market.
