AI Skills Become a Formal Requirement in Polish Job Listings

Familiarity with artificial intelligence tools is no longer just a welcome addition to a CV, it's increasingly showing up as an explicit condition of employment. Data from Pracuj.pl shows that in the first half of 2026, the share of job listings requiring AI skills doubled year over year, growing fastest in the IT sector.

The growth isn't confined to the tech sector. Outside IT, AI skills are rising fastest in professional services, where they already appear in 5.6 percent of listings, and in financial services, at 5.4 percent. That signals employers are no longer treating AI as the exclusive domain of programmers and data analysts.

From nice-to-have to formal requirement

Dominik Malec, an IT labor market expert at Experis, points out that the shift is mainly about the nature of the requirement, not just its scale. Knowledge of AI tools is no longer treated as an optional skill and is starting to function as a formal condition for entering the recruitment process, much like fluency in a foreign language or a specific system.

Familiarity with AI tools is no longer a "nice addition" to a job candidate's CV, and is increasingly becoming a hard formal requirement - Dominik Malec, IT labor market expert, Experis

Malec adds that it's in the IT industry specifically where AI-related competencies are shifting fastest from welcome to required from the very start of the recruitment process. That means candidates without basic proficiency in AI tools risk being screened out at the CV stage, before ever reaching an interview.

Who is raising the bar the most

Joanna Kubik, a manager at staffing agency Randstad, notes that the AI requirement in non-IT listings most often shows up at international and corporate employers, where process and tool standardization is driven top-down from foreign headquarters. Smaller, local companies are keeping pace with the trend more slowly.

The topic of AI skills is definitely coming up in service industries, and it usually involves international companies, often corporate ones - Joanna Kubik, manager, Randstad

Karolina Lis, senior director at recruitment firm Hays Poland, points to a gap between what's expected of candidates and organizations' actual readiness to deploy AI themselves. Companies are formulating requirements faster than they can build the processes needed to actually use these tools effectively. Companies very often lack the know-how and practical knowledge of how to implement and optimize such solutions, Lis says.

Wage premium growing faster than requirements

PwC data shows that AI skills translate directly into pay. The average wage premium for AI tool proficiency rose to 62 percent, up from 57 percent in 2024. The highest premium, reaching 118 percent above the standard rate, is offered by the fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) sector, where automation of marketing and analytics processes is advancing especially quickly.

In IT alone, salary ranges for specialists combining technical skills with AI span from 25,000 to 42,000 zloty per month, with the upper end reached by LLM engineers, specialists in large language models. Those rates are markedly higher than the average for comparable positions without an AI component.

What this means for candidates

Anna Goreń, PR expert at Pracuj.pl, sums up the trend as a gradual shift in AI's status, from a specialist competency to an increasingly universal part of everyday work. In her view, the data shows that familiarity with AI-based tools is increasingly becoming part of what's expected of candidates outside IT as well.

Our data shows that familiarity with AI-based tools is increasingly becoming part of what's expected of candidates outside the IT industry as well - Anna Goreń, PR expert, Pracuj.pl

For job seekers in Poland, this carries a concrete recommendation: basic proficiency in popular AI tools, from text generators to data analysis assistants, is no longer a differentiator but a baseline requirement for an increasing number of roles, including in marketing, sales, e-commerce and finance. The trend fits into a broader picture of the Polish labor market, where the number of listings for AI specialists is growing faster than the number of people ready to fill them, further pushing workers to build up their digital skills quickly.