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Top 12 In-Demand jobs in AI Engineering, Product and AI-powered Innovation for 2025

2024 set the stage for AI-powered innovations, but in 2025, the game is changing faster than ever. With generative and agentic AI advancing rapidly, the AI Act taking effect, and new technologies reshaping industries, building products and businesses looks radically different than before.

For Tech and SaaS companies hiring in 2025, understanding these shifts is crucial. This must-read guide explores the 16 most in-demand roles driving product, engineering, and AI innovation, co-created by ML6; an international AI studio, BOI; a global AI innovation consultancy, and In Five Years; an international talent agency for SaaS scale-ups.

Key roles in AI Engineering, Product and AI-powered Innovation teams

In 2025, diverse teams remain critical to success. The focus on ethics, legal compliance, and new technologies has intensified, reshaping existing roles and introducing new ones.

AI Engineering

Roles within the AI industry have grown and changed significantly. It’s not (only) about hard coding skills, but about putting those skills into production, making an impact on different industries and business cases. Since this impact on the world has grown immensely last year, it only got more important to implement AI in an ethical and secure way.

Since the launch of the EU AI Act, it is recommended for organizations that are exploring deploying their own AI projects, to have internal experts on the subject of for example data governance. Therefore the following roles will become more and more popular in the (near) future:

  • Ethical AI Consultant: Consultants that specialize in building and reviewing ethical frameworks to make sure AI projects are being delivered in an ethical and responsible way. They often focus on topics like AI hallucinations, discrimination and many more. 

  • Legal AI Counsel: Legal AI Counsels are focusing on the legal frameworks. GDPR, Data governance, AI Act… are only a few topics that they manage for an organization. 

  • AI Consultants: AI Consultants translate business needs into technical AI solutions and the other way around. They are a bridge between tech and business and love to inspire people with the latest technologies.

  • ML/Data Engineers: Engineers play a central role in AI development, ensuring that models are not just built but effectively deployed, scaled, and maintained within the broader tech stack. Software, data and ML engineering skills are key components to the success of the role.

AI-powered Innovation

The integration of autonomous innovation pipelines and agentic AI is transforming how companies design, create and scale products and businesses. These systems autonomously identify market opportunities, generate ideas, and refine prototypes, helping businesses accelerate innovation while reducing manual effort. As a result, several key roles have emerged to build, guide, and optimize these pipelines:

  • AI Strategist
    This role involves designing and managing AI-driven innovation frameworks. Strategists identify business challenges that autonomous systems can address, align AI capabilities with company goals, and ensure the pipelines deliver tangible results.
 
  • AI Transformation consultant
    Operating at the AI-human interface level, AI transformation consultants help their clients imagine and create an AI-native operating model for the autonomous world across leadership, people, culture, technology, processes, and business models.
 
  • AI Data Architect
    Data Architects focus on defining and implementing change across Data and AI functions. They drive the simplification, transformation, modernization, and innovation in alignment with the company’s strategic goals. They develop roadmaps, influencing business plans, and guiding data technology decisions and solutions while supporting AI and analytics strategies.
 
  • Synthetic design / researcher
    Synthetic research helps teams test at scale and iterate quickly. By analyzing simulated environments and virtual iterations, these researchers refine concepts and reduce development risks, especially for products involving complex user interactions or involving difficult to reach audiences.
 
  • AI workflow orchestrator
    Orchestrators ensure all parts of an autonomous innovation pipeline work seamlessly together. They configure AI tools to handle tasks from brainstorming and testing to prototyping and deployment, ensuring smooth and efficient workflows, while integrating human oversight.

Product

In 2025, product management is evolving significantly, with a growing emphasis on leveraging AI tools to streamline processes, accelerate innovation, and adapt quickly to market demands. As AI-powered technologies become more embedded in the product lifecycle, product managers are relying on these tools to make data-driven decisions, automate tasks, and improve collaboration across teams.

Here’s how these advancements are reshaping key roles in product management:

  • AI Product Manager: Product managers in 2025 leverage AI tools to accelerate product development in digital development. Developer-friendly platforms (e.g., Netlify) enable quick creation of functional prototypes, with structured code that developers can immediately refine, bypassing the need to start from scratch. By streamlining hosting, CI/CD, and integration with modern frontend frameworks (React, Vue, Next.js, etc.), these platforms ensure that an MVP is not just a rough concept but an Advanced Viable Product (AVP), a fully functional prototype with proper code that development teams can seamlessly build upon.
 
  • AI Product Owner: Product owners in 2025 utilize AI-powered tools to dynamically adjust the product backlog, enabling them to prioritize features more effectively based on real-time customer feedback, business objectives, and evolving market trends. These tools analyze large datasets to identify patterns and customer pain points, allowing product owners to make informed decisions quickly and adjust roadmaps with precision.
 
  • UX/UI Managers: With AI-enhanced design tools like Galileo.ai, UX/UI managers can generate high-quality prototypes in less time, drastically reducing iteration cycles. They focus on delivering personalized user experiences by analyzing user behavior and continuously adapting interfaces to meet evolving expectations. AI tools help them rapidly create and test new ideas, allowing for faster refinement as products evolve towards market fit.
 
  • Service Designers: Service designers now incorporate AI tools to simulate and optimize end-to-end service flows. They use predictive analytics to adjust customer service interactions in real-time, ensuring that the service experience is seamless and efficient across both digital and physical touchpoints. As part of the product team, they ensure that service flows align with evolving product features and provide a consistent, optimized user experience.
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