AI-User Roles Outnumber Developers 4 to 1 in Singapore, Second Talent Says Hiring Processes Haven't Caught Up

Singapore's AI job postings are for people who use AI rather than build it. Second Talent says that changes what companies should be screening for.

AUSTIN, TX, UNITED STATES, August 27, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ -- Singapore put out roughly 1.6 million job postings last year. PwC ran all of them through its 2026 Global AI Jobs Barometer, and 5.3% asked for AI skills, up from 3.3% in 2024. That's about 30,000 extra postings, and around 84,000 AI-related roles in total.

Then look at what those 84,000 roles were. About 82% of the postings were AI-user roles. The other 18% were AI developers. Four to one. And growth ran the same way, with user roles adding around 26,000 postings year on year against roughly 4,200 for developers.

"Companies budgeted for AI as an engineering line item and the market went somewhere else," said Elton Chan, Co-founder and CEO of Second Talent. "The volume is in operations, finance, marketing, and support. Those roles now come with a fluency requirement attached, and most hiring processes have no way to test for it."

PwC reads the split the same way, describing AI moving past specialist teams into non-tech and hybrid positions where working fluency with AI tools is becoming a baseline expectation. Its data also shows a 0.30 correlation between how exposed an occupation is to AI and how much its required skill set has shifted since 2019, which PwC takes as evidence that roles are being reconfigured rather than phased out.

Singapore's Ministry of Manpower also found that in Q1 2026, 18.9% of firms had begun redesigning job functions around AI, and 13.9% had created new roles.

Pay is moving too. Every sector PwC surveyed placed a wage premium on AI-related postings, with the Government and Public Sector at 107% and Consumer Markets at 96%. AI postings rose across all sectors, led by Tech, Media and Telecom, Government and Public Sector, and Financial Services.

What this does to a hiring process

Second Talent, the global talent platform and Employer of Record services across ten Asian markets, said the shift has already changed the shape of client briefs.

"A year ago a client came to us with a stack and a seniority band. Now they come with a workflow," Chan said. "They want someone who can sit inside the finance function and rebuild the reporting process around an AI agent. That person might not be an engineer at all. Or they might be an engineer who's fine spending half their week in a spreadsheet."

So the constraint sits at screening. Resumes list tools. They don't show whether someone can take a messy internal process apart and get an AI system to handle the dull 70% of it reliably, and a standard technical interview won't surface that either. Second Talent said it leans on project simulations for this reason, since the ability it's testing for shows up in how a candidate handles an unfamiliar workflow, not in what they've used before.

There's a regional angle for Singapore employers specifically. Singapore sits at the top of Second Talent's Asian pay bands, with senior engineers across the region running roughly $4,500 to $6,000 a month and Vietnam and the Philippines at the lower end. A company staffing several AI-fluent roles at once will feel that gap, and most Asian markets keep four to six hours of daily overlap with US Eastern time and six to eight with Europe.

A caveat

PwC's barometer measures job postings, which captures intent to hire. It doesn't capture completed hires. Whether Singapore employers actually fill 84,000 AI-related roles, and whether the people they hire into user roles turn out to be any good at them, is a question posting data can't answer.

Chan's suggestion for teams planning 2027 headcount is narrow and testable. Take the next AI role you're about to open, and before writing the spec, ask whether the person needs to build the system or operate it. If it's the second one, stop screening for an AI developer in Singapore. You'll pay a premium for skills the job never uses, and you'll screen out the people who'd have been good at it.

ELTON CHAN
Second Talent
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