AI reshapes labor market: demand for GenAI skills quintupled in two years

According to a study by Sberbank's Center for Macroeconomic Research, the Russian labor market is undergoing structural transformation driven by generative AI. Unemployment is at a historic low of 2.1%, and the labor reserve is nearly exhausted, with wages growing faster than productivity—the accumulated gap since 2012 is about 30 percentage points. The share of job vacancies requiring GenAI skills has increased fivefold in two years, expanding beyond technical roles into marketing, design, SMM, and administrative functions. New professional roles are emerging, including AI trainer/annotator, prompt engineer, LLMOps engineer, AI agent developer, and AI product manager. Among technologies, demand is shifting toward Russian models: GigaChat ranks third in vacancy mentions, and Kandinsky rose from 12th to 8th place. The study notes a weak link between AI exposure and employer demand due to opposing effects of automation and augmentation. The share of vacancies with high automation potential fell from 30.5% to 24.1%, while those with high augmentation potential rose from 18.0% to 23.6%. Alexander Isakov, head of the center, said AI helps mitigate labor shortages by boosting productivity and redistributing labor resources, with the trend toward reduced automation-prone vacancies strengthening.