For the second year in a row, being an AI architect pays the most of any non-executive profession, with experienced architects earning over $200,000. It probably comes as no surprise to anyone who has opened a newspaper lately.

According to Pluralsight’s 2025 Technical Skills Report, only 12% of IT professionals have significant experience working with AI, and four out of five AI projects fail due to a lack of internal knowledge and training. As a result, we predict that AI professionals will only become more in demand, not less. And of course, the greater the demand, the greater the bargaining power.

As we predicted last year, cybersecurity is growing in importance among businesses and public sector organizations. This happens for a number of reasons, mainly related to AI. Threat actors now need fewer skills to conduct a cyber attack and can do so on a larger scale using AI. Additionally, companies have inadvertently increased their exposure to cyber risk by implementing AI (and often poorly), making cybersecurity professionals even more valuable.

We also predict that data and cloud professionals will continue to grow in importance as organizations realize that both clean data and a strong and resilient architecture are both key to the success of their AI projects, as well as just to empower them in general.