Follow ZDNET: Add us as your preferred source Google.
Important points of ZDNET
- AI is changing the IT industry.
- Demand for skills and employment are also changing.
- You can do the following to prepare:
IT professionals remain constant through all the waves of technological change, helping people adopt new technologies, but that doesn’t mean the industry itself won’t change. The AI revolution is no different.
The advent of generative AI has had a major impact on how IT professionals maintain demand, allocate budgets, and develop skills to implement the latest technology. SpiceWorld, Spiceworks’ annual developer IT conference, delved into all of these topics in a session titled “What Generative AI Means for the Future of IT.” (Spiceworks is owned by ZDNET’s parent company, Ziff Davis.)
I had the opportunity to participate in a panel discussion with fellow experts in this field and gleaned some key insights into what you can do to prepare as an IT professional.
Skill up, skill up, skill up
While the most common rhetoric around AI and job security suggests that jobs will continue to decline, with a new Gartner report predicting that AI will cause “job disruption,” the IT industry is experiencing a slightly different reality.
According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, IT jobs are projected to grow three times faster than all jobs from 2024 to 2034, at a rate of 9% compared to 3% for all other jobs. According to Peter Tsai, head of technology insights at Spiceworks, this growth may be due to the adoption of AI creating new security concerns for organizations looking to leverage the technology.
“AI has opened a whole new can of worms for security,” Tsai said. “Overall, the demand for IT jobs will grow at three times the rate of all jobs.”
While this is generally a positive outlook for the IT industry, it is also driving changes in how companies hire and what they are looking for. Spiceworks previewed the 2026 State of IT report, a survey that gathered insights on current trends from more than 800 IT professionals in small and medium-sized businesses, and found that the most in-demand skills reflect the growth of AI.
Also: Want a tech job? These skills will be most important in 2026, according to the State of IT report
Specifically, we found that 63% of respondents believe AI prompting skills are important, which is a 53% increase from last year. However, less than half of respondents said they were confident in their AI skills, with 49% saying they were confident, compared to 42% last year.
“For people who are in the IT industry, learning about AI is a very smart thing to do now, perhaps to level up your skills. It will make you very productive and help you do more or less things,” Tsai said.
As cited during the panel discussion, tackling this work is especially important because while companies are investing significant amounts of money into AI solutions, training is increasingly being put on the back burner or de-prioritized.
For example, while the Wharton School research is often cited when discussing this area, investment in training has waned and so has confidence in training as the primary means of achieving fluency. However, the same study found that a lack of training resources was one of the top 10 barriers to AI adoption.
Growing your investment: How to do it right
Organizations across all industries, including IT departments, are investing significant amounts of money in AI. The 2026 Spiceworks State of IT found that AI initiatives were among the top investments, with AI software (on-premises and cloud-based) accounting for 2.7% (median) of IT computing infrastructure spending.
While that number may seem low, Jim Rapozza, vice president and principal analyst at Aberdeen Strategy and Research, which produces the IT report, points out that the number could be four or five times higher when you factor in all the other infrastructure improvements and investments made to support them, illustrating how large these investments are.
“When it comes to AI, you can completely introduce small language models into AI, or you can do inference, or you can do a lot of LLM under the hood,” Rapozza said. “Companies are building your structures to support things like that.”
Related article: AI will cause ’employment disruption’ in the next few years, says Gartner
Does this level of investment mean companies will see immediate ROI? Not exactly, but we’re seeing progress in that direction. As Rodrigo Gazzaneo, senior GTM specialist for generative AI at Amazon Web Services (AWS), pointed out, companies are already seeing positive results.
Gazzaneo said one of his clients is in the manufacturing industry and began testing using AI tools to study existing ERP and supply chain services that routinely throw exceptions that require human attention. The team was able to regain time without using AI or data scientists.
This is an example of a strategy he recommended. “Crawl, walk, run.” As Gazzaneo explained, the process is simple. Crawl represents the first point where an organization needs to set small, achievable goals that can be achieved in a short period of time. This success may be reflected in subsequent developments.
Also: Worried about AI layoffs? How white-collar workers can protect themselves – Get started now
The team can then proceed to an intermediate phase known as a “walk” that features experimentation. The goal of this phase is to build on what you’ve done so far and create something better, faster, or more ambitious. The company can then move on to the final phase, which involves a leap forward.
“There’s a little bit of time between walking and running, and that’s the key. It’s a leap of faith. But it’s not based on belief. It’s based on a business impact judgment,” Gazzaneo said.
Finally, the execution phase refers to the final stage, where organizations analyze the business impact of expanding or accelerating development. This is often where businesses have the most significant impact on ROI and reap outcomes such as increased customer satisfaction and financial success.
“Run is a generative AI project that creates a lot of value and adds a lot of value to the company,” Gazzaneo said.
