Survey: Talent Shortage Is Top Challenge for Tech Firms

Tech companies can’t hire fast enough. That’s the core finding of the Reveal 2026 IT Talent Survey, released April 16 by Cranbury-based Infragistics, and the numbers behind it are striking.

Eighty percent of technology leaders reported using AI in software development last year, and 77% named expanding AI use as their top strategic priority for 2026. The push to go deeper on AI has collided hard with a workforce that hasn’t caught up, and organizations across the mid-market and enterprise space are feeling it.

AI engineers are the hardest to find. Thirty-nine percent of the 250 senior technology leaders surveyed, including CIOs, CTOs, and VPs of engineering, cited AI engineering roles as the toughest to fill. Cybersecurity engineers came in close behind at 38%, with cloud engineers at 25% and data analytics professionals at 24% rounding out the most difficult positions to staff.

The gap isn’t closing on its own.

“These shortages reflect the complexity of modern technology environments now that AI is part of everyday software development,” said Casey Ciniello, Reveal and Slingshot senior product manager at Infragistics. “Organizations are discovering that adopting AI is easier than finding the people who know how to build, deploy and secure it.”

That tension, the relative ease of adopting AI tools versus the difficulty of hiring people who can actually manage them at scale, runs through the entire survey. Hiring staff with AI skills was a priority for 89% of organizations in 2026 and has since climbed to 91% for 2026. The talent shortage findings tracked by ROI-NJ suggest the demand isn’t theoretical.

What’s worth watching is where the jobs are actually going. Nearly half of organizations surveyed, 48%, said AI adoption has created new roles. Only 18% reported AI-related layoffs. That’s a ratio that doesn’t match the popular narrative about AI gutting tech workforces, and it matters for New Jersey, where the state’s pharma, finance, and tech corridor along Route 1 employs tens of thousands of workers who touch software development in some form.

Two-thirds of organizations that improved productivity last year attributed those gains directly to AI integration. The business case has been made. The bottleneck now is human capital.

The survey was conducted in December 2025 in partnership with Dynata and drew responses from 250 senior technology leaders across mid-market and enterprise organizations. Infragistics, which founder Dean Guida launched in 1989, says it serves large enterprises, including many S&P 500 members, and that more than two million developers worldwide use its UX and UI toolkits.

The ethical side of the AI expansion isn’t getting ignored, at least not entirely. Half of respondents flagged responsible AI use as a major challenge, and 48% pointed to security and privacy risks. Organizations told the survey they’re building out governance frameworks and hunting for professionals with specific expertise in data privacy, bias mitigation, explainability, and secure AI deployment. Those are relatively new job categories, and the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projections for computer and information technology occupations already show faster-than-average growth through the early 2030s, which means competition for that talent won’t ease soon.

For New Jersey’s tech sector, the Infragistics survey lands at a moment when the state is actively trying to position itself as an alternative to higher-cost tech hubs. The Route 1 corridor, running through New Brunswick, Princeton, and into Trenton, has long attracted pharma and biotech companies that increasingly depend on software engineers, data scientists, and AI specialists to run clinical trials, manage supply chains, and build internal platforms. Companies there don’t need a survey to tell them qualified candidates are scarce. They already know. But having the data laid out this clearly, with 91% of organizations prioritizing AI skill hires and fewer than one in five reporting net job losses from AI, gives employers and workforce development programs alike a sharper picture of exactly what they’re competing for and why the hiring crunch isn’t likely to ease through the rest of 2026.