Growth is concentrating in AI-specialty work
CBRE says the AI-skilled workforce reached 751,000 across the United States and Canada by mid-2026, a 45 percent increase from a year earlier. Data science, information-systems management, and technology and engineering roles helped drive the change.
The wider United States technology workforce still grew in 2025, but at a far slower rate than the peak expansion of 2022. The headline is not universal collapse or universal growth. It is a sharp reallocation of demand.
The new jobs and the missing jobs occupy the same market
AI-related roles accounted for 31 percent of available United States tech jobs in June 2026. Non-AI postings were 60 percent below their mid-2022 level nationally and 73 percent lower in the Bay Area, according to the report.
A person can therefore hear that AI talent is booming and still experience a brutally weak market. Aggregate growth does not reveal whether a displaced worker has the credentials, location, network, or paid time required to enter the expanding category.
Protect the route into expertise
Employers are shifting toward specialized skills and more in-person work, while remote postings have declined. That can reinforce geographic concentration and make retraining less useful for people who cannot move to an established hub.
Workforce policy should track apprenticeships, junior hiring, internal mobility, pay, contractor use, and access to training alongside AI job counts. A market that hires experts without developing new ones will eventually discover that oversight also has a talent pipeline.
Go to the source
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CBRE — Scoring Tech Talent 2026
