The proportion of cybersecurity job adverts requiring artificial intelligence skills has doubled year-on-year across G7 countries, according to new research from the Cisco-founded AI Workforce Consortium.
Analysis of recruitment data from Cornerstone and Indeed found that 28.5% of cybersecurity job postings between October 2025 and March 2026 required AI skills, up from 14.2% during the same period a year earlier.
The findings highlight the growing impact of AI on cybersecurity jobs, with the technology changing both the skills expected of individual workers and how security teams are structured.
The report identified the emergence of an “agentic skill stack” as a baseline requirement for high-volume cybersecurity roles including security engineering, cloud security, and detection and response engineering.
Demand for cybersecurity workers more broadly is also continuing to increase. Cybersecurity roles grew by 9.5% across G7 countries during the six-month period ending March 2026.
The Consortium also cited a global shortage of more than 4.8 million cybersecurity professionals, adding further pressure to an industry already struggling to find workers with the required skills.
At the same time, organisations appear to be investing more heavily in AI-powered security technology than in preparing workers to manage it.
A Cisco survey found that more than a third of cybersecurity leaders plan to invest in AI-powered security capabilities over the next one to two years, while only 25% are prioritising investment in people.
The report said the nature of AI skills required within cybersecurity is also changing, shifting away from building AI models towards directing, managing and verifying them.
Technical positions such as security engineers and security operations centre (SOC) analysts remain among the most in-demand cybersecurity roles, but their responsibilities are increasingly being reshaped by automation.
AI systems are beginning to take responsibility for high-volume and repetitive tasks traditionally carried out by SOC analysts, including triaging alerts, correlating threat intelligence feeds and executing standard decision-tree workflows.
As a result, the report said the analyst role is moving away from manual processing and towards strategic orchestration and oversight.
The shift extends beyond individual roles, with security teams increasingly being restructured around different combinations of human and machine work. The Consortium said this could lead to flatter and more fluid reporting structures, with workers increasingly expected to manage portfolios of AI agents rather than this responsibility sitting solely with technical leaders.
Human oversight is expected to remain central to this model, with cybersecurity professionals responsible for validating AI outputs, assessing risk and ensuring decisions are sound.
This is contributing to rapid growth in demand for less technical skills alongside traditional cybersecurity expertise.
Demand for ethical reasoning skills increased by 533% year-on-year, while systems thinking rose by 251% and stakeholder engagement increased by 125%.
The report argued that combining technical expertise with these human-centric capabilities will become increasingly important as autonomous systems take on a greater role within cybersecurity operations.
The AI Workforce Consortium was established in 2024 by Cisco alongside Accenture, Cornerstone, Eightfold AI, Google, IBM, Indeed, Intel, Microsoft and SAP.
It has since added Pearson as a member, while the National Applied AI Consortium, Business-Higher Education Forum and College Board have joined as advisors. The Consortium has also increased its stated goal for global upskilling from 95 million people to 130 million over the next decade.
Entry-Level Cyber Roles Face Growing Experience Gap
While overall demand for cybersecurity professionals is rising, the research also identified a widening disparity between senior and junior opportunities.
Senior-titled cybersecurity job postings grew by 65% during the six months ending March 2026, compared with an increase of just 5.9% for junior-titled roles.
The report said this “experience gap” is putting the cybersecurity talent pipeline under pressure, with entry-level qualifications increasingly misaligned with the requirements of modern security teams.
A Cisco survey conducted in May 2026 found that security leaders regarded hands-on experience with AI agents as the hardest competency to find among entry-level candidates, cited by 49% of respondents.
This was followed by technical cybersecurity depth at 48% and human-centric professional skills at 45%.
The Consortium said addressing the problem will require changes to both cybersecurity education and hiring, with greater emphasis placed on giving students practical experience before entering the workforce.
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“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,” the report read.
The Consortium also called for employers to move away from hiring models heavily weighted towards previous experience and towards skills-based recruitment and talent development.
It pointed to programmes including 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 as examples of efforts designed to give learners more practical experience.
The report forms the first in a new series of AI Workforce Consortium studies examining areas where AI is having a significant workforce impact. The next report is set to focus on responsible AI governance.
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