The demand for technical skills to power agentic AI adoption has increased by up to 60 times levels recorded a year ago.

This is according to new research published by Malt, Europe’s leading freelance management platform.

The findings signify a skills shift that deprioritises only writing code and favours those who excel in designing and orchestrating connected, intelligent systems for business.

The research also found that demand for expertise relating to low-code tools like n8n has grown by more than 14 times its previous level, reaching similar demand to skills in tools such as Java.

The Malt Tech Trends 2026 report draws insights from Europe’s largest independent tech community, analysing keyword searches and project briefs from over 1,000,000 registered freelancers and more than 90,000 companies. The research garnered insights from across the European Union, United Kingdom, and Middle East.

Commenting on the research, Claire Lebarz, CTO at Malt, said: “In recent years, artificial intelligence has evolved from experimentation to widespread adoption and is now present across functions, industries, and company sizes.

“We are not seeing a substitution of humans by machines, but a deeper shift: AI is rewriting where value sits within human work. 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.”

Evidencing the shift away from historically dominant skills, demand for expertise in WordPress and Java has decreased by 20-30% over the past year, in favour of skills related to AI and automation. In line with this, just 20% of freelancers joining Malt specified expertise in JavaScript in 2025, down from 40% in 2024.

The report also found that AI and tech leaders are in hot demand; interim and fractional tech leaders (CTOs, CDOs) is now the fastest-growing job category, up by 23% on the previous year.

About a fifth (22%) of project briefs outside of tech now specify a requirement for AI skills, including marketing, graphic design, and management consulting.

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Demand for expertise in AI regulation has skyrocketed b 380%, with the EU AI Act seeing compliance take on a new importance.

The skills shift has also seen the creation of a new role: the AI-integrated Software Engineer. About two-thirds of AI skill demand refers to  need to combine solid technical expertise either from data science or somewhere engineering with a builder mindset focusing on impact first.

“The transformation is not technical; it is organisational. 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,” concluded Lebarz.