Cybersecurity and AI: the demand for human and ethical skills is growing

ROME – Between October 2025 and March 2026, in the G7 countries, job advertisements in the cybersecurity sector increased by 9.5% compared to the same period of the previous year. In the same period of time, the share of ads requiring AI skills even doubled, going from 14.2% to 28.5%.

But there is more: according to the data emerging from the "AI Agents and the Impact on Cybersecurity", the new Spotlight Report produced by the AI Workforce Consortium, the Consortium born in 2024 on the initiative of Cisco (Accenture, Cornerstone, Eightfold AI, Google, IBM, Indeed, Intel, Microsoft, Pearson and SAP are members), there is a significant growth in the demand for ethical reasoning (+533% year on year) and the ability to involve project stakeholders (+125%).

An evolution which therefore exacerbates the already existing shortage of ICT professionals specialized in cybersecurity equipped with the skills required by the market, making it increasingly urgent to update the training of new recruits and already operational staff.

Speaking of Agentic Artificial Intelligence, Cisco highlights that ICT professionals are the key element of a chain in which man continues to take on a fundamental role, that of defining objectives and limits at each stage, supervising the action of the agents, verifying the results, assuming responsibility for decisions. Therefore, skills that are not explicitly taken into consideration in traditional cybersecurity training curricula are becoming increasingly important: critical and systemic thinking, judgement, adaptability, precision of language, ethical reasoning.

“The data collected by the latest AI Workforce Consortium Report leads us to have to consider two main elements”, declares Renzo Ghizzoni, Head of Cybersecurity Cisco Italy. "The first is that since Artificial Intelligence, and even more so, agentic intelligence, has become a protagonist in digital life, IT security has had to change its skin and will have to do so more and more often, in line with the very rapid evolution of threats and attacks. The second element concerns the human aspect, in the deepest sense of the term. Technological skills will, obviously, be increasingly necessary, but alongside them, those characteristics will be needed that probably, at least at present, no technology is able to offer, i.e. ethics, judgment and critical thinking”.

The growing ability of attackers to use artificial intelligence is pushing companies to accelerate technology investments. However, Cisco research of 8,000 security leaders across 30 markets and 14 industries shows that people are not yet at the center of economic priorities for the next two years.

In fact, 36% of respondents ranked developing AI-based defense capabilities first, followed by improving detection and response times (32%) and application security (27%). Only 25% indicate investing in people among their main priorities.