The Jobstreet AI Gauge, released on 21 October 2026, finds that in Singapore, ads asking for artificial intelligence (AI) skills rose from 1.3% of all Jobstreet ads in January 2024 to 5.1% in August 2026.
That’s still a small slice of the job market, and the report says so itself. The more useful part is where the growth sits. Mentions of agentic AI in Singapore job ads rose 460% in a year, and one creative industry quadrupled its share of AI-related ads.
How the AI Gauge Works
The report comes from SEEK Economics, the research team at SEEK, the Australian Securities Exchange-listed company that runs Jobstreet. The team counted Jobstreet ads that contained at least one term from a long list of AI words, which runs from ChatGPT and PyTorch to AI governance. It covered January 2024 to August 2026 across SEEK’s eight Asia-Pacific markets: Australia, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, New Zealand, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand.
The method is a plain text search, and SEEK is upfront that some false positives may slip through. Phrases like “deep learning culture” at a school can trip the filter. To cut down on noise, the team ignored the last 500 characters of every ad, because that’s where hirers tend to add notes about AI screening. One ad cited in the report told AI-assisted applicants to address a virtual hiring manager called Mr Pineapple Express. The figures are shares of ads rather than headcounts, and the report says it measures demand for AI skills only. It doesn’t track wider shifts in hiring.
Set the 2024 average at 100, and Singapore’s index reached 259.7 by August 2026. That climb is where the “more than tripled” headline comes from.
Among SEEK’s eight markets, Singapore ranks third for AI’s share of job ads. Hong Kong leads at 6.6% and Thailand follows at 5.2%. The report notes that the gap between markets partly reflects each country’s industry mix, so this isn’t a league table of who is “better” at AI.
Agentic AI Is the Breakout Skill
Machine learning, the branch of AI where computers learn patterns from data, is still the most common AI skill in Singapore ads. Mentions were 93% higher in the three months to August 2026 than a year earlier, the fastest growth among SEEK’s markets. Generative AI terms such as foundation models and GPT rose 92.5% over the same period.
Agentic AI is the real headline. These are AI systems that carry out multi-step tasks. Mentions jumped 460% year on year between August 2025 and August 2026. Dr Blair Chapman, SEEK’s Chief Economist, previously worked at the Reserve Bank of Australia. He called the rise “unsurprising”, explaining that agentic AI works “by enabling AI agents to complete entire tasks that would traditionally require human input.”
He flagged the flip side too, saying the risks of AI “are becoming more evident as its use expands, increasing demand for professionals who can support the ethical and responsible deployment of these technologies.” Ads mentioning AI ethics and governance rose 132%. One surprise sits further down the report: computer vision mentions in Singapore fell 22.5% over that period, even as Indonesia and Malaysia posted triple-digit growth.
The Job Titles Have Changed
In 2024, the top three titles linked to AI skills were data scientist, software engineer and software developer. By 2026, AI engineer and automation engineer had joined software engineer at the top. The report reads this as a market moving from building data foundations to putting AI to work.
Titles that turned up on Jobstreet include full-stack AI engineer, AI solutions engineer, AI and digital transformation executive, data privacy and AI trust officer, AI model trainer and AI video creator. Infrastructure roles such as data centre technician and data centre sales director appear on that list as well.
The report describes the data privacy and AI trust officer as ensuring a firm’s adoption of AI is safe and ethical. The AI model trainer converts complex knowledge into structured training data and investigates model failures.
A sample 2026 ad for a Lead AI Engineer accepted “equivalent practical experience supported by a portfolio of built AI projects” in place of a degree. The same ad asked for at least five years of hands-on experience.
Creatives, This One’s for You
Information and Communication Technology (ICT) still has the highest share. AI-related ads there rose from an average of 7.2% in the six months to August 2024 to 21.3% two years later. The jump that should catch a creative’s eye happened in Advertising, Arts & Media, where the AI-related share went from 2.3% to 10.2%. The growth came from roles such as content lead, correspondent and video editor.
The data shows AI terms appearing in these creative ads. It doesn’t show whether other creative jobs are vanishing. Physical industries such as Sport & Recreation, Hospitality & Tourism and Construction saw only marginal change across the two years.
Esther Lee is Managing Director of Jobstreet Singapore, and she put it plainly: “AI is not just a capability confined to tech teams.” She added that “employers will need people who can apply AI in practical ways.”
What SEEK’s Chief Economist Told Us
We put three questions to Dr Blair Chapman, Chief Economist at SEEK, in writing. Asked for one job ad that showed AI skills had moved from nice-to-have to required, he pointed to marketing: “In 2024, AI technologies such as ChatGPT were framed as something marketers should learn and integrate; now candidates are expected to use AI tools directly in content development, proofreading, and campaign ideation.”
The new title that surprised him most was “AI Video Creator”, a role he said “confirms that AI has spread beyond the IT industry and into the creative fields”. According to Chapman, the advertised salary for an AI Video Creator is around S$4,000 to S$6,000.
His advice to final-year students is to “build both technology fluency and durable human skills”, and to “strengthen their problem-solving and judgement, remain open-minded and curious, and develop the agility to learn, adjust, and work effectively in changing environments.”
What to Learn Next
The sample 2026 agentic AI ad in the report asks for Python and experience with large language model APIs for tool calling or multi-step execution, and lists frameworks such as LangGraph and CrewAI as preferred.
You can dig into every chart and the full list of terms in the Jobstreet AI Gauge Singapore report. Live listings are on Jobstreet.
Photos and Visuals courtesy of Jobstreet by SEEK.
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