AI Skills in Cybersecurity Job Postings Double Year-Over-Year as Demand Surges 9.5% Across G7 Nations

AI Workforce Consortium: Building a cybersecurity workforce ready for what's next

Only a few years ago, AI was present in the workplace but peripheral, a specialized tool operating largely out of sight. Today, it's fundamentally changing how we learn, work, and lead. Nowhere is that shift more visible right now than in cybersecurity, where frontier AI models like Anthropic's Mythos Preview and OpenAI's GPT-5.5-Cyber have changed cybersecurity as we know it, and using AI-powered capabilities to tip the scale in favor of defenders over adversaries is critical. This creates a new challenge for leaders, workers, and educators as they consider how to prepare the cybersecurity workforce for an era where humans and AI agents work side by side. That challenge is at the center of the AI Workforce Consortium's latest research, AI Agents and the Impact on Cybersecurity -- the first in a new series of spotlight reports offering more frequent, timely insight into where AI is having the greatest impact. Founded in 2024, the AI Workforce Consortium was created by Cisco alongside industry leaders Accenture, Cornerstone, Eightfold AI, Google, IBM, Indeed, Intel, Microsoft and SAP to help the global workforce thrive through research, scalable frameworks, and access to curated learning resources. Since then, the Consortium has expanded its network, and this year, we're pleased to welcome Pearson as a new member, while the National Applied AI Consortium, the Business-Higher Education Forum, and the College Board join us as advisors. Our commitment has grown too, from an initial goal of upskilling 95 million people globally to 130 million over the next decade, and nowhere is that need more urgent than in cybersecurity. Spotlighting: Cybersecurity Cybersecurity is one of the fastest-growing areas of the technology workforce, with demand for roles growing 9.5% across G7 countries for the 6-month period ending in March 2026, according to our latest findings. Yet globally, there are still more than 4.8 million open cybersecurity roles and not enough skilled professionals to fill them. At the same time, AI is changing what those roles require. Frontier agents are expected to dramatically alter the cybersecurity industry, introducing more automation while simultaneously requiring a human-in-the-lead operating model as a guardrail. As the sector rapidly evolves, security professionals are being asked to understand AI-powered tools, work with autonomous systems, and apply human judgment. Drawing on new, original research combined with expert insights from Consortium members, including our recent webinar, the report reflects what's most important when it comes to understanding the workforce trends in cybersecurity across skilling, job demand and the impact of AI agents. We also introduce a new unified skills framework to help workers, leaders and educators frame the conversation about skills as work moves to agentic AI. The Evolution of Cybersecurity Skills Meeting the AI moment starts with closing the cyber-skills gap so that workforce capabilities grow alongside AI. A new Cisco survey found that cybersecurity leaders are placing big bets on AI but not in the skills people will need to manage it. More than a third plan to invest in AI-powered security capabilities in the next one to two years, while only 25% are prioritizing investments in people. Meanwhile, the demand for AI-related proficiencies in cybersecurity is surging. In our report we found that cybersecurity job postings requiring AI skills have doubled year-over-year across G7 countries. AI skills aren't new to the field, but what's changed is how the nature of that work has shifted, from building models to directing and verifying them. This creates a real opportunity for the workforce. Take the Security Operations Center (SOC) analyst role, which is being rapidly redefined as agentic AI systems assume high-volume, repetitive tasks such as triaging alerts, correlating threat intelligence feeds, and executing standard decision-tree workflows. This transition shifts the analyst's primary function from manual processing to strategic orchestration and oversight. The impact isn't limited to individual roles. As agents take on more of the work, teams themselves are being restructured around new combinations of human and machine effort, with flatter, more fluid reporting lines. Increasingly, every worker will need to manage a portfolio of agents to get work done, not just those in technical leadership. This model only works if organizations invest in the right skills. Those skills are becoming less technical and more human. People remain the final check, validating outputs, assessing risk, and ensuring decisions are sound. Beyond core technical requirements, workers need ethical reasoning (+533% YoY), systems thinking (+251% YoY), and stakeholder engagement (+125% YoY) to manage autonomous systems and work effectively across teams. Building both technical and human skills is what lets people operate the tools and know when to question them. For Early-in-Careers, the "Experience Gap" Remains Closing the skills gap can't stop with the workforce already on the job. It also means rethinking how the next generation of talent gets built, and that pipeline is under real pressure. In the six months ending March 2026, senior-titled postings grew 65%, compared to just 5.9% for junior-titled roles. This gap is largely driven by a growing misalignment between entry-level qualifications and the accelerating requirements of modern security teams. When security leaders were asked which competencies are hardest to find in entry-level candidates, three key areas stood out: * Hands-on experience with AI agents: 49% * Technical cybersecurity depth: 48% * Human skills: 45% To better prepare students for entry-level roles, we have to rethink what gets taught, and how. That means experiential learning, lab exercises where students audit, validate, and critically evaluate AI agent-generated outputs, not just theory. It also means more internships, apprenticeships, and industry-sponsored projects, giving students real-world experience before they're on the job. Employers have a role to play too. Hiring needs to shift from traditional, experience-heavy models to skills-based, proactive talent development. Programs like Google's Vantage Project, IBM's AI Builders Challenge, Cisco's Networking Academy Capture the Flag initiative and Pearson's AI Skills for the Future are replacing theoretical learning with immersive environments that allow learners to solve complex, autonomous challenges in real-time. What Comes Next AI will continue to change cybersecurity. But with the right investment in people, skills, and learning, it can also expand opportunities for the workers and organizations willing to meet the moment. Cybersecurity is one piece of a much bigger shift. Our next spotlight report turns to a related question, how we govern AI responsibly, and we'll host a webinar on this subject next month. Whatever the topic, our job stays the same: helping people navigate what comes next.

AI skills in cybersecurity job postings doubled as junior hiring stalls

AI skills in cybersecurity job postings doubled as junior hiring stalls The AI Workforce Consortium today reported that the share of cybersecurity job postings across the Group of Seven economies that ask for artificial intelligence skills doubled over the year, and junior hiring has not moved with them. This was the first in a new series of spotlight reports, this one on the impact of AI agents on cybersecurity. Job demand across the G7 grew 9.5% in the six months through March, measured against the same period a year earlier. The preceding half-year came in at 6.8%. AI skills turned up in 28.5% of those postings, against 14.2% a year before. The most recent month in the data ran at 29.7%. All of it covers G7 markets only. Sort the same postings by seniority and the picture changes. Senior-titled roles grew 65% in the six months through March. Growth in junior-titled roles was 5.9%. In the half-year before that they had shrunk slightly. The consortium calls this the experience paradox. Employers are asking for senior skills in jobs that are nominally entry level. Cisco Systems Inc., which founded the consortium, asked security leaders what they cannot find in entry-level candidates. Hands-on experience with AI agents was the top gap, at 49%. Technical cybersecurity depth was 48%, human skills 45%. Four percentage points separate the top and bottom of that list, so the three are presented as a cluster rather than a ranking. The same survey asked about budgets. Leaders picked up to three investment priorities for the next two years, and AI-powered defense was chosen most often, by 36%. People came fourth on 25%, level with threat intelligence. Anthropic PBC disclosed a cyber-espionage campaign in November 2025 in which its Claude model ran 80% to 90% of the operation under limited human direction. In early July, Sysdig Inc. documented a fully autonomous ransomware operation. Two weeks after that came an intrusion at Hugging Face Inc. run end to end by an autonomous agent system. OpenAI Group PBC later said said two of its models were involved, one of them unreleased. Cyber refusals had been reduced on both for an internal evaluation. The Five Eyes cybersecurity agencies issued a joint warning on frontier models on June 22. "The timeline is not years, it is months," they wrote. Roles are being rebuilt around that shift. The tier-one security operations center analyst is the clearest case. That job was manual triage. It is now closer to supervising agents and checking their work. Digital forensics analyst was the fastest-growing title in the posting analysis, up 453%, though from a base of roughly 150 to 200 AI-skilled forensics listings per half-year. "One of the roles that is getting reshaped the fastest is the tier 1 SOC analyst," Omar Santos, a distinguished engineer at Cisco, said during a consortium webinar in May. Triage, threat intelligence checks and data correlation are "where agentic systems are now generally effective," he said. "Everybody is an orchestrator now." Ethical reasoning showed up in 533% more cybersecurity listings than a year earlier. Systems thinking was up 251%. Stakeholder engagement, 125%. The bases are small in all three cases, and the authors treat the numbers as direction rather than a measure of market size. IBM Corp.'s Cost of a Data Breach Report 2025 found 63% of breached organizations either had no AI governance policy or were still writing one. One in five reported a breach involving tools staff had adopted outside official channels. Organizations with high levels of shadow AI carried about $670,000 in additional breach cost. Kyu Kwak, chief information security officer at Pearson plc, said the organizations that succeed will be the ones with "the strongest governance around autonomous systems." Employers are paying for the skills they say they cannot find. In Lightcast data cited by the consortium, U.S. cybersecurity jobs that require AI skills advertise a median salary 14.9% higher than the field overall. Cisco set up the consortium in 2024, then called the AI-Enabled ICT Workforce Consortium, with nine other companies, among them Accenture plc, Google LLC and Microsoft Corp. Pearson joined this year, taking it to 11. The combined upskilling target is now 130 million people over the next decade. A second spotlight report, on governing AI, is next.