On March 12, 2025, McKinsey & Co. released its latest “State of AI” report showing a downward trend in “difficulty of hiring” for translators and several other “AI-related roles.”
McKinsey’s survey has included translators in a list of “AI-related roles” since 2022, highlighting their awareness of AI’s immense influence on the translation field in the last few years.
The 2025 version of the report is titled “The state of AI: How organizations are rewiring to capture value,” produced by the company’s AI-focused division QuantumBlack, AI by McKinsey.
Data for the report was collected through a July 2024 survey of 1491 respondents in 101 nations “representing the full range of regions, industries, company sizes, functional specialties, and tenures.” Notably, 42% of respondents reported working for organizations with more than USD 500m in annual revenues.
In the report, translators were included on a list of 12 “AI-related roles” alongside AI data scientists, machine learning engineers, and other AI specialists. The relevant section examines “the state of AI-related hiring.” Respondents were asked to describe hiring for the listed AI-related roles by choosing among options like: “very difficult”, “difficult”, “neither difficult nor easy”, or “easy.”
The report states that the question about hiring difficulty for these roles was “only asked of respondents who said their organizations use Al in at least 1 function and who said their organization hired the given role in the past 12 months.”
Unfortunately, the report does not describe how the survey defined “difficulty in hiring,” or what criteria respondents were asked to use to assess that difficulty.
Still, with three years of survey data, the report shows not just a line, but a potential emerging trend in the reported difficulty of hiring translators. About 55% of respondents described hiring translators as “difficult” or “very difficult” in 2024, down from just under 65% in 2023, and just over 70% in 2022.
This trend was not unique to translators. In general, fewer respondents expressed difficulty hiring for eight of the 12 “AI-related” roles listed in the survey, compared to the previous two years. (It should be noted that two of the listed roles were not included in McKinsey’s 2022 and 2023 surveys).
However, while the reported level of difficulty hiring is lower compared to the previous two years, the data from 2024 still shows that a slight majority of surveyed companies struggle to hire translators. The report acknowledges, “respondents continue to see these roles as largely challenging to fill.”
Also, the report does not attempt to rigorously explain the trend; instead, it provides only general comments. Senior partner and McKinsey Global Institute director, Lareina Yee, noted in her commentary section that “Perhaps more people are taking the initiative to enhance their own capabilities. Or it could be that corporate investments in upskilling are beginning to bear fruit.”
Yee’s comments are in line with Slator’s June 2024 survey of 260 translators and interpreters, though, with about one-third of respondents reportedly gaining new AI skills in the previous year.
As AI language solutions continue to alter both the demand and supply of language professionals, it is likely that the translator role will continue to evolve. As a result, it is difficult to predict how this “difficulty in hiring” trend may change in the near future.