Published on the 22/01/2026 | Written by Heather Wright

Skill-fusion, silent repricing and the builders required…

As global tech markets accelerate into an ‘AI-driven’ era, new data is providing a more detailed picture of the impact on skills, and the competition for them, showing that APAC is on a rapid expansion path for tech talent .

The report from Draup, which provides ‘talent intelligence’, also shows AI is compressing the half-life of technical skills to under two year and rendering some IT skill sets obsolete. The market, however, is fighting back, reorganising into ‘builders’, orchestrators and ‘synthesisers’.

“AI is compressing skill cycles, reshaping roles and shifting where productivity comes from faster than most organisations expect.”

The Economics of Skills: An Analysis of Global Tech Talent says by 2027 more than 40 percent of IT skills will be rendered partially obsolete. That’s not due to job loss, but instead thanks to ‘skill fusion’ and AI-enabled workflows. Automation was cited by large tech companies in connection with nearly 50,000 job cuts in the US last year, exacerbating concerns about job security, career progression and the speed with which roles are changing.

Even with near-term layoffs, the report points to net job growth by the ned of the decade, driven by productivity gains and demand for AI, cybersecurity and hybrid roles.

“We are not seeing tech jobs disappear outright, but the way work gets done is certainly changing, Vishnu Shankar, Draup VP of data and platform, says. “AI is compressing skill cycles, reshaping roles and shifting where productivity comes from faster than most organisations expect.”

This goes beyond hiring more, or fewer, people, he says. It’s about how work actually gets done as AI becomes part of everyday roles.

According to the report, shifting global labour patterns are reshaping the distribution of technical capability across regions. Emerging regions, such as APAC – which along with Latin America is experiencing the fastest expansion in tech talent, driven by maturing labour pools and consistently rising enterprise demand – are becoming critical engines of growth, the report says. APAC’s growth isn’t just about volume, with the report noting that emerging regions are evolving from being delivery centres to a source of AI, data and engineering talent. That reflects what Draup says is a broader global trend away from old, cost-driven models towards highly distributed, multi-node talent ecosystems.

It’s data, which Draup says is drawn from more than one million companies, 850. Million professionals, 56,000 technologies and 8,500 labour providers, puts Australia’s tech talent supply at 983,000, with a five percent growth rate and a demand growth rate of 26 percent – requiring another 250,700 more tech professionals. New Zealand, meanwhile has a supply market of 156,000, and six percent growth rate, with a 21 percent demand growth rate, or 32,200.

Within Draup’s polycentric model of the global talent ecosystem, Australia and New Zealand occupy a distinct category as ‘innovation nodes’ alongside countries like Israel and Singapore. These nodes are defined not by scale, but by niche capabilities.

There’s special mention too, for Adelaide. It’s flagged as an ‘advanced tier two location’ with rising prominence. These are cities across the globe which are rapidly gaining prominence as competitive alternatives to established tech hubs and experiencing accelerated tech company growth, major hyperscaler and enterprise investments and increasing R&D activity.

Other advanced tier-two cities include Ireland’s Limerick, Leipzig in Germany – with greentech, life sciences and digital tech clusters and strong investment, talent access and its strategic location linking central and eastern Europe – and Boise, Idaho in the US, home to an $800m Meta data centre and Micron Technology’s chip fabrication plant which is expected to create 2,000 direct, and 15,000 indirect, jobs.

The report notes a ‘silent repricing’ reshaping global labour markets, with regional pay gaps narrowing and labour arbitrage now below 20 percent for many niche roles across AI, cybersecurity and data engineering.

The new roles

As AI tools infiltrate organisations, human-only tasks are shrinking while AI-led and human-machine collaboration are ‘rapidly expanding’ across engineering functions.

“Job creation and automation are converging to drive the future of enterprise value.”

The report forecasts that the share of tasks executed primarily by technology is predicted to grow from 22 percent in 2025 to 34 percent by 2030, making a 50 percent increase in automation-driven work within five years.

The analysis also notes ongoing talent supply-demand gaps, with software development, cybersecurity, data analytics and AI/ML roles facing the largest gaps in 2025. For most of those areas the gaps are forecast to gradually narrow by 2028. That’s not the case, however, for cybersecurity.

Draup says hiring is also shifting away from traditional job titles, with the rise of ‘builders’, ‘orchestrators’ and ‘synthesisers’ – new hybrid role archetypes. Builders are the engineers who create, train and architect systems; orchestrators are roles managing integration, deployment and automation; while the synthesisers are hybrid roles bridging business, tech and AI-enabled decisioning.

“Strategic workforce planning must recalibrate to hire the right mix of talent, signalling an urgent shift from traditional roles to demand for builders. The role of HR evolves from filling traditional roles to engineering workforce composition.”

Meanwhile, for workers with innovation centric capabilities, there’s money to be made, with rising demand for ‘new age skills’ driving talent premiums. Draup notes early adopters in emerging technologies can command a premium until the talent supply catches up, and candidates with niche skills are reducing ramp-up time by delivering faster results. Those niche skills often directly influence topline growth, like AI/ML product features, or bottom-line savings like automation via cloud scripting.

Compensation design must continue shifting from role-based pay to skill-based compensation architectures, especially in domains like AI, ML, cloud and cybersecurity, it says.

The upshot, according to the report? Skills are expiring faster and AI is reshaping work composition as the global talent markets decentralise.

“The future demands a shift from headcount to effective digital capacity, driven by continuous upskilling of the augmented employee and a strategic, polycentric talent architecture. Ultimately, competitiveness through 2030 will favour organisations that can continuously adapt.”