AI and the ICT labour market - between hype and long-term effect.

In Swissquote Magazine (Issue 96, December 2025), our co-founder Klaus Fuchs offers a grounded read on what AI is actually doing to the ICT labour market - not the usual disruption-or-collapse headlines, but a structural recalibration. The throughline: work is not disappearing, it is being redistributed toward depth.

AI is not eliminating jobs indiscriminately - it is redefining where value is created. Roles built on standardised, easily transferable tasks, like classic frontend or mobile development, lose relative prominence; that is maturation, not crisis. The premium moves to people who can train and deploy models, navigate regulation, and translate capability into real business outcomes - depth over breadth.

After years of rewarding speed and youth, the balance is tilting back toward experience. The most valuable profiles now pair technical skill with domain knowledge and regulatory understanding: AI engineers who know Basel and MiCA in financial services, cleared profiles in defense, risk-and-compliance fluency in insurance, approval and data-privacy know-how in healthcare, legal reasoning in compliance. Experience, judgment and context are becoming strategic assets again.

This is where Europe has a quiet advantage - exactly where maturity matters: regulatory competence, industrial depth, experienced talent pools. And it is where Switzerland fits, not competing head-on with US platforms but as a highly specialised AI hub built on research excellence, institutional stability and talent density, with rising demand for machine-learning specialists and global expansion pointing to durable long-term potential.

The takeaway is about mindset, not diagnosis: technology rewards specialisation over generalisation, experience is becoming an asset again, and long-term positioning beats short-term reaction. Those who invest now in skills, strategy and context are not just reacting to change - they are shaping it. That long-term, depth-first view is exactly how we recruit.