A year ago, Claude barely registered in UK hiring. It was fourth on our list, mentioned in 181 job ads a month, well behind ChatGPT, Copilot and Gemini. This month, it’s first.
Claude was mentioned in 1,855 UK job ads in September – just ahead of Microsoft Copilot’s 1,781. It’s the first time Copilot hasn’t led since we started tracking named AI tools in the UK, and it’s happened fast: Claude’s mentions are up 925% year-on-year, more than three times Copilot’s growth and nine times faster than ChatGPT.
The US got there first, actually. Claude overtook Copilot there back in May and has led in four of the last five months – Copilot briefly grabbed the top spot back in August, then lost it again in September. Gemini’s had the roughest ride: it led the US market a year ago and has now dropped 34% year-on-year, the only major tool going backwards.
It’s the latest from the Adzuna AI Mentions Index, our monthly look at how UK and US employers are writing AI requirements into job ads.
Why Copilot lost the lead
Copilot’s strength was always partly a numbers game. When a company rolls out Microsoft 365 Copilot, it lands in front of the whole workforce at once, whether or not any individual employee asked for it. That’s a different kind of growth to Claude’s, which has come almost entirely in the last twelve months, and looks more like specific, deliberate demand.
Claude’s share of all UK named-tool mentions has gone from 11% a year ago to 34% now. If you’re job hunting and your CV just says “ChatGPT experience,” that’s starting to look dated – employers are increasingly naming the tool they want, not just asking for “AI skills” as a vague line.
The AI skills story isn’t just tech anymore
25,000 UK job ads now mention AI every month, up from 14,700 a year ago – a 70% rise, even as total UK vacancies fell 8% over the same period.
IT and computing still leads by a distance, at 1 in 4 ads. But it’s no longer where the growth is:
- Healthcare & nursing mentions are up 3.6x year-on-year
- Accounting & Finance is up 2.7x
- Creative & Design is up 2.7x
- Sales is up 2.9x
We said this back in April and it still holds: the fastest AI adoption isn’t happening in tech job ads. It’s happening in marketing, HR, admin, healthcare – the departments that aren’t traditionally thought of as tech-adjacent at all.
The backdrop: AI demand rising as hiring cools
Set against what’s happening to hiring more broadly, this gets more interesting. Across every sector we track with enough data, AI mentions have grown over the past year – even in the sectors where the number of jobs advertised has fallen fastest.
Sales vacancies are down 24% year-on-year, but AI mentions in Sales job ads have more than doubled. HR & recruitment vacancies are down a similar amount, while AI mentions there have also roughly doubled. Healthcare & nursing – one of the more stable sectors, with vacancies down just 3% – has actually seen the sharpest AI-mention growth of any major sector, up 3.5 times.
| Sector | Vacancies YoY | AI mentions YoY | % ads mentioning AI (Sept 2026) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sales | -24% | +2.2x | 5.3% |
| HR & recruitment | -24% | +2.0x | 5.9% |
| Marketing / advertising / PR | -20% | +1.2x | 15.1% |
| Accounting & Finance | -18% | +2.2x | 4.8% |
| Admin / clerical / secretarial | -16% | +2.2x | 5.0% |
| IT / Computing / Software | -11% | +1.5x | 25.4% |
| Healthcare & nursing | -3% | +3.5x | 1.9% |
| Education & teaching | +22% | +2.1x | 0.2% |
Note: This isn’t proof that AI is displacing these roles. The vacancy declines primarily are the result of the broader post-2022 hiring correction, interest rates and sector-specific conditions. But AI fluency is clearly becoming a baseline requirement even while hiring is shrinking. Employers want it whether they’re growing or not.
The Atlantic gap just got wider
The US is still well ahead of the UK in absolute terms, and that gap grew this year instead of shrinking. US AI mentions are up 129% year-on-year – from 2.2% to 5.1% of all US job ads – against 84% growth in the UK, from 1.8% to 3.4%. Back in April we found the opposite: UK growth was outpacing the US. Not anymore.
The bigger picture
We’ve been tracking the UK index since January 2022. Over that period, our AI-mentions index has climbed to 139, while the total-vacancies index has fallen to 65 – the widest gap we’ve recorded between AI-related hiring demand and the broader market.
What it means if you’re job hunting
It’s starting to matter which tool you know, not just whether you’ve used one. Claude going from fourth to first in a year says employers are getting specific about what they want – so it’s worth checking which tools are actually in demand in your sector, rather than leaving “AI experience” as a generic line on your CV.
Methodology
The Adzuna AI Mentions Index tracks the proportion of UK and US job listings that reference artificial intelligence, large language models, or named AI tools including ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, GitHub Copilot, Google Gemini, Anthropic Claude and Perplexity from Adzuna’s full job listing database.
Category-level figures are only reported where average monthly AI mentions exceed 30.
Copilot mentions combine Microsoft 365 Copilot and GitHub Copilot – two separate products, so the combined figure reflects Microsoft’s enterprise reach rather than one tool’s popularity.