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Research from Malt, which describes itself as Europe’s leading freelance management platform, suggests that businesses are now looking for a completely different set of tech skills from even two years ago. And it’s all being driven by AI, which may not be taking our jobs but certainly is transforming our skillsets.
“We are not seeing a substitution of humans by machines, but a deeper shift: AI is rewriting where value sits within human work,” said Claire Lebarz, CTO at Malt. “We have entered a period of deep structural realignment where value no longer resides in the ability to execute a task, but in the capacity to design the systems that perform it.”
It’s this realignment that means businesses want people who can orchestrate the rollout of AI adoption. So rather than looking for people who can write code, they want people who can design complete systems.
“The demand is staggering: the number of briefs for AI Agents has exploded by x60, with searches up x26,” states the report. “This represents a fundamental reordering of priorities. AI is no longer a “bolt-on” feature; it is the new engine of architectural change, moving from static information retrieval to active workflow execution.”
There are still hot tech skills that go beyond your ability to enter a prompt into Claude. The research found that mastery of low-code tools had grown by more than 14 times, to the point that it now matches Java.
In addition to this, businesses want experts in AI regulation. Demand has “skyrocketed by 380%”, according to Malt, in part due to the impact of the EU’s AI Act.
Good news for AI and tech leaders too. “Interim and fractional tech leadership (CTOs, CDOs) is now the fastest-growing job category, up by 23% on the previous year,” states Malt.
And Malt reckons it has even identified a new job role: AI-integrated Software Engineer. That is, someone from a data science or software engineering background who can match that with AI expertise.
“The transformation is not technical; it is organisational.” said Lebarz. “We are no longer just managing code, infrastructure, or roadmaps. Instead, we are choreographing intelligence. Success will be measured by how effectively we harmonise human ingenuity with machine autonomy to create a system that learns, adapts, and scales.”
While WordPress, Python, React.js, JavaScript and PHP skills are still very much in demand – they fill five of the top ten skills wanted by companies in the survey – their numbers are all pointing downwards.
When Malt compared job roles advertised in 2025 to 2024, across the UK, Europe and the Middle East, it discovered these drops:
| PHP | -33% |
| React.js | -16% |
| JavaScript | -15% |
| WordPress | -11% |
| Python | -3% |
The result is a big shift from the skills that freelancers declare to those that companies want. Time to retrain or at the very least update your profile.
