Russian Employers Increasingly Seek Generative AI Skills, Sberbank Study Finds

Russian companies are looking for generative AI skills far more often this year, according to a Sberbank study obtained by RIA Novosti.

In September 2026, 4,700 job vacancies required generative AI skills - nearly 20% more than a year earlier and three times the figure at the start of 2025.

The demand is no longer confined to IT. Seven of the ten professions where employers most often expect such skills are non-technical. Designers rank second only to programmers in the number of vacancies, ahead of data scientists, followed by marketers, SMM managers and secretaries.

Sberbank itself hired nearly three times as many AI specialists in the first nine months of 2026 as in all of 2025. The company is also creating new professional roles and training employees whose jobs are not directly tied to technology.

The study notes that AI development is driving demand for specialists across a range of profiles - from ML engineers and AI experts to those who prepare data for training models.