Microsoft and Google AI talent war signals wider skills dearth as AI job postings rise 61% in 2024

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On 5 February Microsoft’s AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman announced that three of his former Google DeepMind colleagues will join Microsoft’s AI team in Zurich. The move is the latest in an ongoing Big Tech talent war which is reflected in an increase in global demand for AI skills.

Microsoft opened it Zurich lab in in 2022 and announced its new London AI hub in April 2024. Referring to the new appointments Suleyman wrote: “It’s a stellar team and will be an important hub for MAI alongside our London office, which is growing fast too!”

Site selection for cross border business expansions requires the evaluation of many parameters, none more important than the local skills base. Global expansion allows Big Tech to exploit local talent around centres of technology excellence like London and Zurich as competition for skills increases in the US.

Suleyman is a case in point. Google acquired the leading UK AI startup DeepMind for which he is a co-founder way back in 2014, allowing the US company significant advancement, at the time, over its peers in AI. Suleyman’s next venture, machine learning and GenAI startup Inflection AI, saw Suleyman and the entirety of the 70-person Inflection team including his co-founder Karén Simonyan lured away by Microsoft in an acquihire deal.

Microsoft’s most recent hires Zalán Borsos, Marco Tagliasacchi, and Matthias Minderer are said to have built NotebookLM’s Audio Overviews and worked on Astra, DeepMind’s AI agent, according to a report by the Financial Times. The news hires are said to have text to audio and Agentic AI skills which are both in much demand.

GlobalData senior analyst Beatriz Valle noted that these Microsoft hires are typical of the current landscape of growing competition among the main players in GenAI.

“Microsoft is presumably getting ready for some big announcements as part of its Copilot platform later this year, likely around Agentic AI and multimodal AI. The former enables users to deploy capabilities without a human in the loop, making GenAI applications a more interesting investment with a clearer ROI path,” said Valle.

The development of GenAI and, more recently, the focus on Agentic AI which is seen as a natural progression in the development cycle of AI, has see the number of job postings for this skillset increase by 61% in 2024, according to GlobalData’s Annual Jobs Analytics Signals Report, published in February 2025. The result was particularly striking when noting that the report found increases in job posting across all industries stood at 1.4% year-on-year.

The report noted: “Increased focus on GenAI, AI Agents, and Agentic AI roles boosted the demand for expertise in ChatGPT and Copilot.” Globally and across all industry sectors in 2024, new job postings were driven by roles for AI/ML Engineers, cloud architects, and GenAI solution architects.

AI job postings were the most in demand significantly outpacing increased job postings in cybersecurity (24.8%), big data (22.8%) and cloud (21.2%) which were the next in demand skill types.

Helen Fleming, executive director for search & specialisms at global technology recruiters, Harvey Nash, said: “We’re seeing that the war for AI talent is very concentrated in senior level roles at the Big Tech giants – as there is a unique set of circumstances where these firms have lots to gain by being quick out of the blocks in developing cutting edge AI tools.

“However, we are not yet seeing this demand seep down into middle management level positions and below.” Fleming predicts continued and significant competition for the best talent with skills shortages in priority areas such as data, AI, software development and cyber.

“Our own research has shown that outside of pay, culture and working environment, alongside diversity, will remain critical to attracting tech talent,” she said.

While tech leaders were reporting a scarcity of AI skills, very few say that their organisations are upskilling, according to Fleming.

Indeed, CEO and founder of HR tech agency RAMP Global John Paul Caffery advises businesses to invest in upskilling existing teams. “With continuous training and development in the latest AI technologies. This ensures the workforce stays ahead of the curve while retaining highly skilled professionals.”

On the global search for AI talent Caffery suggests that businesses accessing remote talent into local markets, leveraging global talent pools while maintaining local operations is an approach which could provide a more diverse and specialised workforce without geographical limitations.

“The rise of remote working patterns globally has allowed companies to widen their search for talent geographically, with technology tools facilitating the talent search in new emerging markets so that businesses can tap into the best talent, at a better rate, in locations outside of traditional larger markets,” said Caffery.

“As more businesses look to scale AI solutions, emerging markets are proving to be invaluable sources for specialised talent with lower overheads,” he said.