AI literacy is the fastest rising skill in hiring

The signal in this year's workforce data is hard to miss: knowing how to work with AI has become a hiring criterion in its own right.

In a survey of tens of thousands of workers and leaders across dozens of countries, 71 percent of leaders said they would pick a candidate with AI skills over a more experienced candidate who lacked them. A year earlier that idea would have read as speculative. Now it is the baseline expectation for a growing share of roles.

The longer view points the same way. Employers ranking the skills rising fastest in importance put analytical thinking and AI literacy at the very top, ahead of many of the credentials that hiring has leaned on for decades.

The takeaway for anyone hiring is simple. AI literacy is no longer a nice to have, and it is not the same thing as years on a resume. The useful question is how well a person actually works with AI on real tasks: how clearly they direct it, how carefully they check what it returns, and when they decide to trust it. That is what we built Acta to measure.

References

1. 01Microsoft and LinkedIn Work Trend Index 2025: The Year the Frontier Firm Is Born. Microsoft WorkLab, 2025.Read source
2. 02World Economic Forum Future of Jobs Report 2025. World Economic Forum, 2025.Read source