AI is a third of tech listings — hire outside the Bay Area

AI-related roles now make up nearly a third of US tech-talent listings, up 45% year over year, according to CBRE's annual Scoring Tech Talent report released August 21. The headline everyone ran with was New York finally passing the San Francisco Bay Area. The number that matters if you're staffing a small team is the other one: where the remaining two-thirds of that talent actually sits.

What actually happened

CBRE's 13th annual report put New York's tech workforce at 394,300 against the Bay Area's 375,730 — the first time New York has led in the survey's history. New York grew 8.4% since 2022, adding 30,640 jobs; the Bay Area contracted about 6% over the same period. As CNBC reported, the swing is two forces at once: non-AI layoffs in the Bay Area and finance-sector hiring of AI talent in New York. Only 34% of New York's tech workers are employed by tech companies at all; 21% work in finance, insurance and real estate.

The AI-specific figures: 751,000 AI-related workers across the US and Canada as of June 2026, with the fastest-growing roles being data scientist (+29,000) and computer and information systems manager (+24,600). Four metros — the Bay Area, New York, Seattle and Washington DC — hold 37% of US AI jobs.

Why the AI talent market matters for your business

Thirty-seven percent in four metros means sixty-three percent everywhere else. That is the operator's read. You are not competing with a hedge fund's comp band for the person who can wire an extraction pipeline into your ERP. Phoenix, Austin, Raleigh, Toronto — the people who ship this work are distributed. The concentration story is about where capital clusters, not where competence lives.

"AI-skilled" is largely a conversion, not a new species. CBRE counts existing roles reclassified as AI-skilled alongside net new hires. Your current developer or ops lead learning to build against an inference API is the same event, at your scale. Budget the training week. It costs less than a search and it retains someone who already knows your business.

The fastest-growing role is data scientist, and you probably don't need one. Adding 29,000 of anything means the title is being applied loosely. What most small businesses actually need is someone who can clean a data source, define what a correct output looks like, and write the evaluation that catches drift. Hire for that, describe it in the posting, and skip the credential.

Watch this as a demand signal for your own pricing. If finance is absorbing AI talent in New York at these rates, the internal-build option is getting expensive for exactly the mid-market companies who might otherwise hire you or us. Cheap for them to buy, expensive for them to staff — that gap is the business.

Sources: CBRE Scoring Tech Talent 2026, CNBC, Commercial Observer.