AI skills now requested in more than a quarter of cybersecurity job ads

Job postings asking for AI skills in cybersecurity have doubled in a year across G7 countries. Research from the Cisco-founded AI Workforce Consortium, using data from Cornerstone and Indeed, found that 28.5% of cybersecurity postings between October 2025 and March 2026 required AI skills, up from 14.2% a year earlier. US data from Lightcast shows the median advertised pay for these postings was 14.9% higher than for cybersecurity postings overall.

Five skills appear repeatedly in AI-tagged postings: Python, prompt and context engineering, AI security, agent orchestration, and machine learning operations. Security Engineer and Cybersecurity Engineer/Analyst remain the most commonly listed roles, at 18% and 16% of postings, followed by SOC Analyst at 12% and Cloud Security Engineer at 9%. AI systems are taking over repetitive SOC work such as triaging alerts and correlating threat intelligence, and Cisco's Omar Santos described the analyst's role as shifting towards orchestrator rather than processor of alerts.

The report argues that human expertise stays essential, because nobody can check a machine's reasoning about a packet capture without knowing how to read one. New duties include supervising agents, validating their output and handling exceptions. Postings asking for ethical reasoning grew 533% and stakeholder engagement 125%. Over half of surveyed security leaders named securing autonomous AI systems as the top skill for entry-level workers by 2030.