Artificial intelligence has moved from the margins of the CV to a visible part of candidates’ professional skill sets, according to analysis of 15.5 million CVs by CV builder CVwizard.
Mentions of AI tools increased more than 100-fold between 2020 and 2026, with the sharpest acceleration in 2025, when mentions rose to more than 2.5 times their 2024 level. ChatGPT is the most frequently mentioned AI tool, appearing on almost 22,000 CVs, followed by Copilot and Claude. Other tools in the ten most-mentioned include Gemini, GitHub Copilot, Midjourney, DALL·E and Stable Diffusion.
Individual tools have followed different trajectories between 2025 and 2026. Claude mentions increased 164%, Gemini mentions increased 93%, and Perplexity mentions increased 58%. By contrast, Stable Diffusion mentions fell 36%, Llama mentions fell 31%, and ChatGPT mentions fell 22%.
AI becomes a standard skill signal
Candidates increasingly regard the ability to work with AI tools as a skill worth signalling to employers, alongside other established workplace software and technical capabilities. This aligns with job role data: Indeed found that about 8% of job listings now feature artificial intelligence in their titles or descriptions, which tripled since 2022.
Traditional technology skills remain highly visible on CVs. Excel is the most frequently mentioned technical skill, appearing on around 14% of CVs, followed by Word at 10% and PowerPoint at 6%. Among programming languages, Python is the most frequently mentioned, followed by R, HTML, Java, SQL, CSS and C++.
CVs growing longer as candidates signal digital capability
The shift is reflected in how candidates’ CVs are written. Overall CV word counts increased 58.5% between 2020 and 2026. CVwizard suggests that the growing accessibility of AI-powered tools may be one factor contributing to the increase.
As candidates increasingly write for both human readers and automated recruitment systems, the CV is becoming a place where digital capability is explicitly signalled. This reflects a broader change in what candidates consider valuable professional fluency: alongside conventional workplace tools, AI and coding are increasingly treated as skills that belong on the CV.
CVwizard analysed 15.5 million CVs created on its platform between 2020 and June 2026, examining the frequency and prevalence of skills, language and design characteristics and tracking changes over time.
Source: CVwizard
Paul Gray is the publisher of Talent Acquisition Professional and its sister titles at Black and White Trading Ltd, including HRreview and Workplace Wellbeing Professional. He oversees the editorial programme for UK in-house talent acquisition teams.
