Generative AI Contract Job Trends in the South West

Generative Artificial Intelligence (Gen AI)
England > South West

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs advertised in the South West requiring Generative AI skills. It covers contract job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 5 November 2025, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
5 Nov 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 120 132 -
Rank change year-on-year +12 - -
Contract jobs citing Generative AI 4 1 0
As % of all contract jobs in the South West 0.19% 0.042% -
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 0.21% 0.049% -
Number of daily rates quoted 2 1 0
10th Percentile £611 - -
25th Percentile £684 - -
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £838 £450 -
Median % change year-on-year +86.11% - -
75th Percentile £1,009 - -
90th Percentile £1,094 - -
England median daily rate £550 £625 £650
% change year-on-year -12.00% -3.85% -

All Process and Methodology Skills
South West

Generative AI falls under the Processes and Methodologies category. For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract job vacancies requiring process or methodology skills in the South West.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for process or methodology skills 1,898 2,029 2,726
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the South West 89.11% 84.47% 87.46%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,097 1,218 1,842
10th Percentile £225 £313 £300
25th Percentile £378 £425 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £519 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year -1.24% -4.55% +4.76%
75th Percentile £625 £638 £650
90th Percentile £725 £734 £719
England median daily rate £508 £525 £550
% change year-on-year -3.33% -4.55% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 279 149 286
10th Percentile £15.20 £15.28 £20.38
25th Percentile £18.87 £33.00 £45.00
Median hourly rate £25.15 £65.00 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year -61.31% +8.33% -7.69%
75th Percentile £63.75 £70.25 £70.00
90th Percentile £67.87 £74.00 £83.40
England median hourly rate £25.15 £38.04 £45.00
% change year-on-year -33.88% -15.48% +28.57%

Generative AI
Job Vacancy Trend in the South West

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings citing Generative AI relative to all contract IT jobs advertised in the South West.

Generative AI job vacancy trend in the South West

Generative AI
Daily Rate Trend in the South West

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the South West citing Generative AI.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the South West citing Generative AI

Generative AI
Daily Rate Histogram in the South West

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Generative AI in the South West over the 6 months to 5 November 2025.

Daily rate histogram for Generative AI in the South West

Generative AI
Contract Job Locations in the South West

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing Generative AI within the South West region over the 6 months to 5 November 2025. The 'Rank Change' column provides an indication of the change in demand within each location based on the same 6 month period last year.

Location Rank Change
on Same Period
Last Year
Matching
Contract
IT Job Ads
Median
Daily Rate
Past 6 Months
Median Daily Rate
% Change
on Same Period
Last Year
Live
Jobs
Somerset +1 2 £1,100 +144.44% 11
Dorset - 1 - -
Bristol - 1 £575 - 27
Generative AI
England

Generative AI
Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities in the South West by Category

The following tables expand on the one above by listing co-occurrences grouped by category. They cover the same employment type, locality and period, with up to 20 co-occurrences shown in each category:

Cloud Services
1 2 (50.00%) Azure
1 2 (50.00%) GitHub
2 1 (25.00%) AWS
2 1 (25.00%) Azure DevOps
2 1 (25.00%) GCP
2 1 (25.00%) GitHub Actions
2 1 (25.00%) GitHub Copilot
Development Applications
1 2 (50.00%) SonarQube
2 1 (25.00%) Code Climate
2 1 (25.00%) Git
2 1 (25.00%) GitLab
2 1 (25.00%) Jenkins
General
1 1 (25.00%) Aerospace
1 1 (25.00%) Public Sector
Job Titles
1 2 (50.00%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
2 1 (25.00%) DevOps Engineer
2 1 (25.00%) Head of AI
2 1 (25.00%) Head of Data Science
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 2 (50.00%) Hugging Face
2 1 (25.00%) .NET
2 1 (25.00%) RESTful
2 1 (25.00%) YAML
Processes & Methodologies
1 3 (75.00%) AI
2 2 (50.00%) CI/CD
3 1 (25.00%) A/B Testing
3 1 (25.00%) Agile
3 1 (25.00%) Applied Mathematics
3 1 (25.00%) Computer Vision
3 1 (25.00%) Data Analysis
3 1 (25.00%) Data Science
3 1 (25.00%) Decision Tree
3 1 (25.00%) DevSecOps
3 1 (25.00%) Infrastructure as Code
3 1 (25.00%) LLM
3 1 (25.00%) Mathematics
3 1 (25.00%) Project Delivery
3 1 (25.00%) Prompt Engineering
3 1 (25.00%) Random Forest
3 1 (25.00%) Scrum
3 1 (25.00%) Statistical Analysis
3 1 (25.00%) Statistics
3 1 (25.00%) Task Automation
Programming Languages
1 3 (75.00%) Python
2 1 (25.00%) C++
2 1 (25.00%) PowerShell
2 1 (25.00%) R
2 1 (25.00%) SQL
Qualifications
1 2 (50.00%) SC Cleared
1 2 (50.00%) Security Cleared
System Software
1 1 (25.00%) Docker
Systems Management
1 1 (25.00%) Terraform
Vendors
1 1 (25.00%) OpenAI