A commentary published in HR Magazine argues that UK employers, not the wider labor market, are the primary cause of the AI skills shortage they routinely cite in workforce plans. The piece carries the headline: "Employers must stop creating an AI skills shortage."

The argument centers on a familiar complaint from HR directors: the organization cannot hire people with the AI capabilities it needs. According to the article, that framing obscures the more uncomfortable reality — internal decisions about training budgets, job design, and pay are what produce the gap in the first place.

What is the article actually claiming?

The piece does not treat the AI skills shortage as a market failure. Instead, it positions employers as active participants in the shortfall. HR teams, the article suggests, keep posting job descriptions that require two-to-three-year tenures in narrowly defined AI roles that few candidates can satisfy, while simultaneously running the same generic reskilling programs that have been on the L&D calendar for years.

Readers should treat this as an opinion column rather than a research finding. The article carries no survey methodology, no sample size, and no named executive making the claim on the record. The strength of the argument rests on the author's framing, not on quantitative evidence presented in the available excerpt.

What does this mean for HR leaders?

For HR directors, the operational question is whether current hiring specifications match how AI work actually gets done inside the business. Three decisions are worth pressure-testing:

• Job design. Are AI roles scoped around a realistic blend of domain expertise and tooling, or around a unicorn candidate who does not exist at the offered salary band?
• Internal mobility. Does the organization actively move mid-career employees into AI-adjacent work, or does it default to external hiring for every new AI seat?
• L&D spend. Is training budget going toward accredited AI programs, or toward the same leadership workshops that have run for a decade?

These are the levers the article points to as evidence that the skills gap is a choice, not a constraint.

How should HR teams respond?

The most useful response is audit, not defense. HR leaders can pull their last 12 months of AI-related requisitions and ask how many were filled, how long each search took, and how many hires came through internal development rather than external search. If internal development is at or near zero, the article's premise holds inside that organization regardless of the wider market.

Compensation benchmarking is the second check. If pay bands for AI roles sit at the median of comparable firms, the shortage is genuinely external. If they sit below, the shortage is self-inflicted.

What to watch next

HR Magazine does not link the commentary to a specific employer case study, a regulatory change, or new CIPD data in the available excerpt. Readers should expect follow-up coverage to test the argument against named organizations that have rebuilt their AI hiring approach around internal pipelines rather than external search. The piece is best read as a provocation that frames the next round of workforce-planning conversations, not as a verdict on them.