The Ukrainian labor market in 2025 received a clear signal: skills in working with artificial intelligence have stopped being an “interesting option” and have turned into a measurable advantage in money, hiring conditions, and bonuses. This is evident not from slogans about “digital transformation,” but from specific job offers and from how employers describe the value of a candidate. Over the year, the average salary of specialists whose vacancies explicitly mentioned AI competencies increased from 28,750 UAH in the first quarter to 40,000 UAH in the fourth quarter. That is plus 11,250 UAH, or about 39%. Even if these figures are treated as a snapshot of vacancies rather than actual payments in every signed contract, the dynamic is telling: the market began to pay more not for a “position,” but for the ability to work faster, more accurately, and at greater scale thanks to AI tools. At the same time, the boundaries of the pay range shifted. The minimum offer in the category rose from 17,000 UAH to 22,000 UAH, while the upper limit moved from “over 94,000 UAH” to “over 100,000 UAH.” An important nuance in these figures is that very small numbers of vacancies are associated with the minimum and maximum values. This means we are dealing with a market where very high rates exist, but there are few of them, and the overall picture is shaped by a broader layer of offers in the middle segment.
The highest earnings are predictably concentrated in IT. Among the examples of top offers with specified AI skills are Senior ASP.NET developer 150,000 UAH, Senior .NET developer 146,000 UAH, ASP.NET programmer 137,500 UAH, .NET programmer 133,500 UAH. In these roles, “AI” in the job description often does not mean abstract interest in technology, but a concrete requirement to understand how to use AI tools in development, automation, testing, data work, and team productivity. But 2025 is interesting for another reason: AI competencies began to penetrate roles that are traditionally not considered “technical.” One of the signals is the appearance among top offers of non-IT positions, in particular a treasury head with a salary of 135,000 UAH for having skills in working with artificial intelligence. This does not mean that a finance professional now needs to “be a programmer.” It means that AI has become a tool for risk management, speed of analysis, report preparation, process control, and scenario planning, and employers are willing to pay extra for the ability to apply these tools in practice. This shift is most clearly visible in marketing, advertising, and PR. If the average salary of specialists without AI skills in these fields is about 31,000 UAH, then possessing AI tools allows internet marketers, SMM managers, and graphic designers to raise their average income to 42,500 UAH that is, by approximately 37%. There is an important meaning hidden in this figure: in many companies, marketing is no longer perceived as “creativity for the sake of creativity”; it is becoming a function of measurable efficiency, and AI is used as an accelerator of content production, audience analysis, A/B approaches, and optimization of advertising budgets. A candidate who can do this quickly and predictably gains a financial advantage.
Another trend of 2025 should be recorded separately: AI skills began to influence not only salary, but also a candidate’s negotiating position regarding conditions. Employers’ offers increasingly include a set of non-monetary benefits: bonuses, free training, medical insurance, as well as options for reservation. In the overall picture, the following proportions appear: 21% of companies are ready to offer bonuses, 19% free training, over 15% options such as reservation and medical insurance. It is important to read this soberly: this is not about “everyone getting reservation,” but about some employers using additional tools to compete for scarce people, especially when it comes to specific applied skills that deliver measurable results. In the IT segment, this effect is described separately: with knowledge of artificial intelligence, the average salary increases from 36,000 UAH to 47,250 UAH, that is by approximately 31%. At the same time, some IT companies add free training and reservation to their offers. This looks logical: if a company is buying not “just a developer,” but a person who increases productivity and closes more complex tasks, it tries to secure that person not only with money, but also with conditions.
Time for Action analyzed all confirmed information from the salary offer market and saw a simple pattern: in 2025 AI became not a profession, but a layer above a profession that converts into money when it brings the employer speed, resource savings, or higher quality of results. That is why the most noticeable growth is recorded at the end of the year, when the number of vacancies requiring AI skills reached peak values and competition for candidates intensified.
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But even more important is why this trend is unlikely to stop. In Ukraine, a separate line of state digital policy is being formed in parallel: the declared goal is to enter the top three countries in the world in terms of artificial intelligence development, and the key instrument is to be the launch of a national large language model, trained on Ukrainian data. “Kyivstar” has been identified as the technical partner, financing the development with subsequent transfer of the product to the state. The basis for adaptation is named the Gemma family of models from Google, which are being tailored to the Ukrainian language and context. The project’s roadmap outlines stages: by January 2026 the first text base for deep training, an improved tokenizer, proprietary benchmarks to test quality and ethics, as well as independent control of safety and compliance with ethical standards. A public stage is also planned spring 2026 as the period of public beta testing, as well as the start of a public vote for the name via the “Diia” application. These plans do not mean an automatic jump in salaries. But they do mean that AI is becoming infrastructure, not a one-off trend. If an ecosystem is being formed in the country where business, the state, education, and media work with large data sets, build quality standards, and legalize frameworks for working with intellectual property and data, then the need for specialists who know how to apply AI will be not situational, but systemic.
At the same time, there is a boundary that is important not to cross in interpreting these figures. Salary indicators and “AI premiums” reflect the market of vacancies with relevant requirements, not a universal reality for all workers. High rates of 100,000-150,000 UAH are primarily a story of senior-level and narrow roles. They show the top of the market, but do not mean that “everyone who opened ChatGPT” earns that much. The difference is made not by the fact of familiarity with a tool, but by the ability to embed it into work in a way that delivers measurable results for the company. In this sense, 2025 became a marker of maturity. The market stopped being fascinated by the word “AI” itself and began to count the effect. That is why in vacancies the average values grow simultaneously, the minimum threshold rises, and the upper limit slowly expands. And along with money, other offers appear: training, bonuses, sometimes reservation, as a way to secure a person who gives the company a competitive advantage. The main conclusion here is simple, but not comforting: AI skills in Ukraine have stopped being a “plus on a resume” and have become a factor that changes the price of labor. For some professions, this is a chance to grow incomes faster. For others, it is a signal that without updating tools they risk ending up in the lower part of the market, where the employer’s choice is increasingly determined not by a diploma, but by productivity and flexibility.
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