Nearly twice as likely to be seeking AI fluency from IT candidates year over year, organizations are steadily increasing hiring efforts to accomplish AI implementation goals.
AI skills continue to drive IT job postings, with 75% of US technology openings requiring AI fluency in June, up 178% year-over-year, according to the Dice July 2026 Jobs Report.
Roles in the software industry continue to rise, ranking second behind consulting as the industry seeking the most IT help right now. Aerospace/defense, finance/banking, and manufacturing round out the top five.
Most sought after in the market right now are software engineers, data engineers, systems engineers, electrical engineers, business analysts, data scientists, network engineers, systems administrators, data analysts, and AI engineers, according to Dice.
While these roles remain in high demand, the biggest shift can be seen in the skills that hiring managers are seeking — a list now dominated by AI or AI-adjacent skills as companies rush to adopt enterprise AI tools and services.
The skills that matter most
Demand for enterprise integration skills grew 638% from June 2025 to 2026, the biggest rise year over year, according to Dice, noting that this aligns with other indicators that “connecting agentic systems to existing infrastructure is growing faster than the agentic systems themselves.”
Following in terms of highest growth in demand over the past year are skills involving:
- Agentic AI (587%)
- AI agents (503%)
- Responsible AI (495%)
- AI infrastructure (366%)
- Vector databases (353%)
- Event-driven programming (310%)
- Product family engineering (287%)
- Prompt engineering (253%)
- Observability (251%)
Month over month, the list of fastest growing skills in Dice’s July jobs report includes:
- Electronic engineering (69%)
- API system integration (58%)
- LDAP (55%)
- Digital forensics (54%)
- Data exchange (53%)
- Enterprise integration (50%)
- Threat detection (48%)
- NIST Cybersecurity Framework (47%)
- SAML (45%)
Again, the rise in demand for API, data exchange, and integration skills highlights the recent push to “connect AI systems to enterprise data and workflows,” according to Dice.
Hot hiring markets
Some metro areas are seeing faster increases in tech job postings, with a focus around the New York, Washington, Dallas, Chicago, and San Francisco metro areas. These areas have seen greater growth than the rest of the country, making these metro areas the best to live in if you’re a job seeker with AI fluency skills:
| Metro area | IT job postings (June) |
| New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ | 20,858 |
| Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV | 19,906 |
| Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, TX | 11,932 |
| Chicago-Naperville-Elgin, IL-IN | 9,346 |
| San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA | 8,699 |
Credit: Dice July 2026 Jobs Report
New Jersey (64%), Maryland (47%), and Illinois (41%) are the states that have seen the highest year-over-year increase in hiring.
Roles in demand
Companies are looking for enterprise systems and consulting managers, including Appian developers, Oracle Cloud financial consultants, ServiceNow managers, principal consultants, and technology consultants. Additionally, they are seeking out IT software engineers, C++ software developers, configuration analysts, support engineers, network infrastructure engineers, AI analysts, and cyber threat intelligence analysts.
Outlook
Businesses inside and outside the tech industry will continue to seek tech workers to help realize AI visions, requiring a wide range of AI fluency and skills. It seems this trend will continue for the foreseeable future, as the job market slowly recovers from several tumultuous years.
