UK Ranks Third for AI Talent, says new CBRE Report

CBRE’s latest Global Tech Talent report highlights AI as a major driver of tech funding, despite an industry-wide slowdown that began in 2023. According to the report, AI-development talent is concentrated in the US primarily, followed by India, with the UK ranking third. Across Europe, demand is growing fastest in Poland and Germany.

The report shows that advances in AI continue to positively disrupt the tech market, and this was a major driver of venture capital funding, accounting for $129 billion across 5,900 deals worldwide in 2024.

Tech workers

Tech talent is most concentrated in enterprise services & manufacturing, the report reveals, initially due to an increase in ecommerce and remote working since the pandemic. More recently with the accelerating investment into Deep Technology innovation.

Labour is cited as the biggest expense for most non-manufacturing tech companies, followed by real estate. The highest salaries for European software engineers are in Zurich and Brussels the report found, and the lowest in Budapest and Bucharest.

Effects of the pandemic

While the pandemic accelerated growth across several Tech sub-sectors, as the pandemic eased by 2022, business conditions changed and many of the major tech companies began reducing their employee headcounts. However, the number of job losses declined by more than 40% in 2024 vs 2023, largely fuelled by an accelerated investment in AI led innovation, with most of the major tech companies having higher employee counts than pre-pandemic levels.

Emerging markets

Growth across Emerging markets is being enabled by advancing education and tech skills, business-friendly environments, lower operating costs and an attractive quality of life, according to CBRE’s report. Remote working has also been noted as positively impacted emerging markets, by making them more viable within global team structures.

The report identifies the following European markets as emerging in the tech talent space: Belgrade (Serbia), Katowice (Poland), Leipzig (Germany) & Lille (France).

London as a Tech Capital

The report also highlights that London retains its status as a technology powerhouse, thanks to its strong financial sector and connections with global markets. The city is a key centre for fintech and digital innovation, hosting companies such as DeepMind and Revolut as well as having a dynamic creative digital media sector and market leading lifescience research and innovation hubs.

London’s tech talent workforce sits between 300,000 – 500,000, on a similar scale to New York, Paris, the San Francisco Bay Area and Toronto. The average software engineer is earning just under $130,000. And, with roughly 30.2% is going towards their rent each month.