The 2025 AI Hiring Playbook

From Market Chaos to Competitive Edge

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Art Zeile

CEO, Dice

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A Quick Note from Dice CEO Art Zeile

Building AI Hiring Strategies to Staff the Future

The market has moved from “how do we build AI?” to “how do we build our business with AI?” This fundamental shift creates massive opportunities for recruiters who understand the new landscape. While competitors chase “AI developers” with generic searches, smart recruiters are quietly placing implementation-focused candidates at 18% salary premiums.

Key Market Intelligence:

  • 36% of tech job postings now require AI skills
  • Implementation skills exploded year over year: AI Agents (+2,043%), RAG (+475%), Edge Intelligence (+608%) while research skills decline
  • Texas outpaces California in AI hiring growth (149% vs 108% year-over-year)
  • Traditional industries (manufacturing, healthcare, aerospace) are hiring AI talent faster than pure tech companies
  • Consulting firms dominate: Four of the top 25 AI hirers are Deloitte, Accenture, PwC, and KPMG

Organizations increasingly need people who can implement, scale, and govern AI capabilities alongside traditional AI development. The fastest growth is in AI Orchestrators (prompt engineers, implementation specialists) and AI-Enhanced Professionals (traditional tech roles using AI tools). Understanding the distinct AI talent tiers and their market dynamics is essential for successful AI placements.

Report Methodology

To present the insights in this report, Dice used job posting data provided by Dice’s partner, Lightcast, which has a database of more than 1 billion current and historical job postings worldwide. Dice pulled data on June 5, 2025 and analyzed tech job postings in the U.S. using Lightcast’s skills category taxonomy specific to “Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (AI/ML)” and “Natural Language Processing (NLP)”. The AI/ML subcategory contains 301 skills (up from 120 in 2024) and the NLP subcategory contains 65 skills (up from 44 in 2024). The information in this report is a snapshot of tech job posting data as of June 6, 2025 and backward revisions to prior month’s data may occur from the sources used in this report.