Which AI tools do employers ask for most?

Outside cloud infrastructure, MCP and Claude Code — named at 47 and 46 of 90 AI companies' job boards respectively. Both appear at about half of them, which is remarkable for tools that did not exist two years ago.

Do job ads ask for Cursor?

Less than you would expect. Cursor is named at 16 of 90 boards and in 31 of 8,239 postings. The AI editors as a group are named far less often than the protocol and the agent — employers write down what a role builds against, and an editor is a personal choice rather than a requirement.

How was this measured?

Every open role on 90 AI companies' public applicant tracking systems was fetched and its text matched against a fixed vocabulary of 44 tools. A company's own board is excluded from its own tool's count, since a posting that says "About Cursor" is not a company hiring for Cursor. Names that are ordinary English words must appear capitalised and more than once, and a name introduced by a customer roll-call is discounted.

Does a mention mean the job requires the tool?

No, and the distinction matters. This counts postings that name a tool anywhere in their text — in the stack, in the responsibilities, or as a nice-to-have. It measures what employers think is worth writing down, which is a weaker claim than a requirement and a more useful one than a survey of what developers have installed.

Is this the whole job market?

No. These are 90 AI companies' own boards, so the figures describe hiring inside that industry rather than software hiring generally. That is the population this board covers, and it is the one where these tools are most likely to appear at all — so treat the shares as an upper bound, not an average.

Research

Which AI tools employers actually ask for

Every survey of AI tool adoption asks developers what they use. This counts what employers wrote in the requirements — 8,239 postings at 90 AI companies’ own job boards, read on 26 August 2026.

postings read: 8,239
of boards name MCP: 52%
name Cursor: 18%

Employers write down the protocol, not the editor

MCP is named at 47 of 90 boards and Claude Code at 46 — about half of them each, for two things that did not exist two years ago. Cursor, the tool with by far the loudest discourse attached to it, appears at 16, and GitHub Copilot at 9.

The gap is not a popularity contest, and reading it as one gets it backwards. An editor is a personal choice — a company that lets you use Cursor has no reason to put it in a job advert. A protocol a product exposes, or an agent a team builds against, is part of the work, and that is what ends up in the requirements.

So this measures something narrower than adoption and more useful than sentiment: what employers consider load-bearing enough to name.

Every tool, by how many boards name it

Sorted by distinct companies rather than raw mentions: one company with three hundred postings should not decide what an industry asks for, and a tool named once at forty companies is a stronger signal than one named forty times at one. Tools under 5 boards are counted in the totals but not listed.

Every tracked tool named in at least 5 companies' postings, by number of companies.
Tool	Postings	Of 90 boards
AWS	1285 postings	67
MCP	177 postings	47
Claude Code	174 postings	46
Figma	125 postings	38
Zapier	41 postings	20
LangChain	75 postings	18
Vercel	27 postings	17
Cursor	31 postings	16
n8n	30 postings	16
Make	23 postings	14
Cloudflare	237 postings	12
LlamaIndex	21 postings	9
GitHub Copilot	16 postings	9
Codex	62 postings	8
pgvector	10 postings	7
CrewAI	9 postings	7
Temporal	10 postings	6
Vercel AI SDK	10 postings	6
Gemini	6 postings	5
Pinecone	6 postings	5

What the top of the table is really telling you

AWS leads at 67 boards, which is the least surprising line here and the most useful one: it is the yardstick. Any tool approaching it is genuinely embedded, and everything far below it is still a specialism rather than an assumption.

5 of the 44 tools this board tracks were named in no posting at all, and 19 more were named at fewer than 5 companies. That is worth stating plainly because it is the same fact from the other side: most of the tooling conversation is not yet in anyone’s job requirements.

It is also why several tool pages on this board carry no roles. A tag with nothing live behind it stays out of the index rather than becoming a page about nothing.

Questions

Which AI tools do employers ask for most?: Outside cloud infrastructure, MCP and Claude Code — named at 47 and 46 of 90 AI companies' job boards respectively. Both appear at about half of them, which is remarkable for tools that did not exist two years ago.
Do job ads ask for Cursor?: Less than you would expect. Cursor is named at 16 of 90 boards and in 31 of 8,239 postings. The AI editors as a group are named far less often than the protocol and the agent — employers write down what a role builds against, and an editor is a personal choice rather than a requirement.
How was this measured?: Every open role on 90 AI companies' public applicant tracking systems was fetched and its text matched against a fixed vocabulary of 44 tools. A company's own board is excluded from its own tool's count, since a posting that says "About Cursor" is not a company hiring for Cursor. Names that are ordinary English words must appear capitalised and more than once, and a name introduced by a customer roll-call is discounted.
Does a mention mean the job requires the tool?: No, and the distinction matters. This counts postings that name a tool anywhere in their text — in the stack, in the responsibilities, or as a nice-to-have. It measures what employers think is worth writing down, which is a weaker claim than a requirement and a more useful one than a survey of what developers have installed.
Is this the whole job market?: No. These are 90 AI companies' own boards, so the figures describe hiring inside that industry rather than software hiring generally. That is the population this board covers, and it is the one where these tools are most likely to appear at all — so treat the shares as an upper bound, not an average.

Scanned on 26 August 2026. A company’s own board is excluded from its own tool’s count — otherwise every tool whose maker is on this list would top the table by describing itself. The snapshot moves only when the harvest is re-run. Quote it freely; a link back lets a reader check how old it is.

Roles for each of these tools What those roles pay