Serbia’s AI hiring accelerates as broader IT job listings shrink

Serbia’s technology labour market is offering a split signal to employers and investors: artificial intelligence is moving from a specialised capability toward a fast-emerging core skillset, increasingly detached from the cyclical slowdown hitting the broader IT sector.

AI postings surge while overall IT hiring cools

Data from HelloWorld.rs indicate that practical demand for AI professionals more than doubled over the past year. Job postings increased from 192 positions in 2024 to 347 in 2025, a gain of more than 80% year-on-year.

That momentum contrasts with the broader IT labour market, which contracted by approximately 16% in total job listings during 2025. The divergence points to a structural shift rather than a uniform hiring cycle: traditional software roles appear to be stabilising after the post-pandemic hiring boom, while AI-related positions are expanding quickly from a smaller starting base.

Growth remains modest in absolute terms, but trajectory matters

Although the absolute number of AI roles is still relatively small, the growth trajectory is decisive. The article notes that Serbia is broadly tracking global trends, where AI roles rank among the fastest-growing employment categories and typically see salary growth rates above the industry average.

New industries join the search for AI talent

The composition of demand is also changing. While the IT sector continues to dominate hiring, non-technology industries are increasingly entering the picture. Financial services and insurance companies have doubled their demand for AI talent, and telecommunications firms have recorded multiple-fold increases in job postings.

At the same time, domestic companies are beginning to embed AI across operational functions—including human resources, data analytics and e-commerce—suggesting a move from experimentation toward production-level deployment.

Roles and skills shift toward operational deployment

The most frequently advertised positions reflect this transition. Listings increasingly feature AI Engineer and Machine Learning Engineer roles, along with software developers who can incorporate AI capabilities—roles described as largely absent from Serbia’s market just a year earlier.

On skills, Python remains foundational. Demand is also expanding toward data analytics and business intelligence, alongside cloud-based deployment capabilities. Employers increasingly expect candidates not only to build models but to operationalise them within scalable production environments, linking AI development with cloud infrastructure and DevOps practices.

A bifurcated market with longer-term implications

Taken together, the data suggest a bifurcation of Serbia’s tech labour market. Conventional IT hiring appears to be normalising amid tighter budgets and global tech recalibration, while AI talent is becoming a strategic priority—driven by cross-sector digitalisation and the need to integrate automation, predictive analytics and generative models into core business processes.

For investors and decision-makers, the implication is less about short-term volatility in recruitment and more about long-term structural repositioning: AI is transitioning from an experimental layer into a foundational component of enterprise technology stacks. Serbia appears to be aligning gradually—at smaller scale and with delays typical of emerging tech markets—to that global shift.