94% of UK tech leaders say Cloud transformation is a key business goal in the next three years, compared to 88% who are prioritising AI. This is reflected in the skilling priorities for tech leadership, with foundational IT capabilities including Cloud (70%), data (59%), and cybersecurity (52%) skills, ranked as critically important, above AI skills (50%).

Coursera and AWS surveyed 750+ senior technology executives in six countries, leading digital transformation initiatives across the United Kingdom, France, the United States, India, Mexico, and the United Arab Emirates.

Critical skills needed to drive transformation goals

More than half (52%) of UK tech leaders do not think their current team members have the skills needed to achieve their business transformation goals in the next 12-18 months. To overcome this, three-quarters (75%) of these leaders see training existing employees as critical in the next 12 to 18 months, while two-thirds (67%) see keeping pace with technology as the most urgent driver for skills development within their team.

Despite this focus on transformation-related skilling drives, AI is only the fourth-highest skill in terms of priority for tech leaders. In fact, reflecting the increasing risk of threats to businesses, cybersecurity ranks higher in importance than AI, taking third place. This comes as attack frequencies rise in the UK – over a quarter (27%) of companies were hit by a cyber-attack in the past year, up from just 16%. Recognising the implications for their businesses, 62% of UK tech leaders say staying ahead of security threats is a key driver of skills development.

Other key drivers of skills development across tech organisations include:

• Managing complex infrastructure (46%)
• Optimising cloud spend and IT budgets (46%)
• Aligning product to business strategy (46%)

British tech leaders are already seeing benefits for current employees from skilling investments. These include enhanced performance and productivity leading to better work outputs (79%), and improved talent mobility (59%), with team members better able to take on new roles and responsibilities within the organisation.

Automation is coming, but skills gaps persist

While cloud transformation is topping the priorities list for skilling strategy, AI and automation are fundamentally changing the way we work. With significant shifts in the future of work led by automation, more than half (54%) of UK tech leaders anticipate that 30-50% of their own tasks will be automated within the next three years.

Nearly all (99%) respondents anticipate that their codebases will be partially AI generated or developed with AI assistance in the next 3 years – and 86% percent of tech leaders anticipate that up to 20 to 50% of their codebase will be either AI-generated or developed with AI assistance.

While automation will provide more time for strategic work, skills are a vital part of this AI transition across sectors. Globally, more than three-quarters of respondents (78%) believe that all technical roles addressed will be impacted in some way by task automation due to developments in AI in the next three years. Software developer (42%) and systems developer roles (41%) are anticipated to be most significantly impacted.

Employers demand AI-ready employees

With an impetus to secure the right skills for technology  transformation, UK tech leaders now want new hires to already possess AI skills on day one. Over two-thirds (68%) of UK tech leaders expect new hires, regardless of their specific role, to understand how generative AI could be applied to their work tasks.

Data suggests that there is demand for educational institutions to respond to these employer demands. Insights from Coursera’s Micro-Credentials Impact Report 2025 highlight that nine in 10 (93%) students believe GenAI training belongs in degree programmes, while nine in ten (94%) employers believe universities should equip graduates with GenAI skills for entry-level roles.

Despite this demand for employees to possess key job skills before day one in the office, a similar number of leaders (74%) acknowledge they cannot depend on hiring alone to fulfil AI skills gaps, indicating that training must intervene to fill them.

“Tech leaders may be under increasing pressure to deliver AI transformation, but our research shows that they view the cloud as an equally essential foundation. You can’t scale AI capabilities without this foundation – and UK tech leaders are rightly prioritising cloud transformation to build the infrastructure, security and data capabilities upon which AI depends” said Mustafa Furniturewala, CTO, Coursera.

“While AI skills will be vital in the coming years – with the UK government identifying investment in the technology as the new economic frontier – adjacent IT skills cannot be overlooked. In fact, AI currently ranks fourth on the list of top skills priorities, behind foundational IT expertise in cloud, data and cybersecurity. AI deployment is inherently connected to, and dependent upon these areas – from data science to cybersecurity and cloud operations – and successfully prioritising them together as part of a unified strategy will confer significant advantage upon leaders across industries.”

For more startup news, check out the other articles on the website, and subscribe to the magazine for free. Listen to The Cereal Entrepreneur podcast for more interviews with entrepreneurs and big-hitters in the startup ecosystem.