What IT skills will be in demand in 2026?

Back in the day, IT pros who wanted to get ahead in their careers needed to learn concepts like hybrid cloud and APIs. Now, according to tech practitioners who spoke with IT Brew, IT pros wanting to land a job or a promotion need to focus on skills in one key area.

“The most in-demand one that we see is using AI at work, depending on the context of your work,” Tigran Sloyan, co-founder and CEO of AI-native skills platform CodeSignal, told IT Brew, when asked about today’s most desirable AI-related expertise.

McKinsey’s State of AI report, released in November 2025, found that 88% of surveyed global organizations are using AI in at least one business function, up from 78% a year ago. Almost 40% said they have begun experimenting with AI agents, with another 10% saying they’ve begun scaling to play a larger part in company operations.

What skills? For Sloyan, companies and employees who want to use AI to improve productivity must answer three fundamental questions—subcategories, essentially, for practitioners trying to figure out that bigger objective of how to use AI at work:

• AI capability awareness: What are the AI options out there?
• AI proficiency and use: Can those capabilities be applied to a day-to-day job?
• AI limitations: What can’t it do?

“If you know what [AI] can do but you can’t use it, that’s not going to make you very effective,” Sloyan said, adding that if you don’t even know what AI can do, you can’t begin an implementation effort. If you know what it can do and know how to use it, but don’t understand where the limits lie, you’re going to make a lot of mistakes and cause a lot of frustration.

Ethics? A recent survey from nonprofit tech organization IEEE found that the top AI-related skills for 2026 include:

• AI ethical practices skills (according to 44% of respondents; a 9% YOY increase)
• Data analysis skills (38%; +4%)
• Machine learning skills (34%; +6%)

Why do IT pros need to master AI ethics? Maybe an AI-enabled system is monitoring employee productivity, IEEE fellow Karen Panetta imagines, and that impacts business leaders’ personnel decisions. An ethics-minded IT pro would need to understand data sources and training examples to provide context and determine any potential bias on the platform’s part.

Panetta said employers could determine ethics experience by seeing one’s workplace certifications or experiences on projects like audit committees.

Uncertainly! TechGuide recently ranked Master of Science in AI programs, placing Carnegie Mellon, Duke, and Northwestern in the top three spots. While the average total tuition for those options, according to TechGuide, reached $64,154, other learning organizations like CodeSignal and Udacity offer lower-cost learning options.

The range of training options and costs suggests an AI field that’s both evolving and uncertain, despite the hype. A recent MIT study revealed that 95% of 300 organizations found zero return on their AI investments in H1 2025.

James Stanger, chief technology evangelist at CompTIA, was one of the few who spoke to IT Brew who did not immediately list AI as an IT skill in demand. As companies change their processes, he sees value in learning business workflows and root-cause analysis—a problem-solving technique taught in some cybersecurity training programs.

“I don’t think we live in a world any right now, where you can have the luxury like it was five years ago, even three years ago, where you could reel off a set of discrete skills. I think you have to have a really good understanding of the current systems…the IT systems, and the current business systems,” Stanger said.

Serious business. Bryan Bischof, head of AI at Theory Ventures, said the most sought-after skills include integrating AI into workflows, which means knowing the nuances of products, their security mechanisms, and how those products connect to the data in other SaaS products. That also involves a teaching responsibility as IT pros get an organization up to speed on a given tool, he said.

IT pros implementing AI processes will have to work closely with non-technical teams—like finance or HR—as they connect those teams’ data sets to large language models, according to Yoav Susz, US GM at Atera. That means IT pros need to shift their focus from mundane tasks (like troubleshooting the printer) to strategic ones—as well as softer skills, such as effectively communicating with senior leaders.

“I think that all of a sudden, the IT team needs to have a better understanding of how the business actually operates.”