The development of artificial intelligence has significantly changed the structure of demand in the Ukrainian freelance market. Customers are increasingly delegating simple tasks to neural networks, instead turning to live specialists mainly for complex, narrow-profile and more expensive solutions.
The development of artificial intelligence has significantly changed the structure of demand in the Ukrainian freelance market. Customers are increasingly delegating simple tasks to neural networks, instead turning to live specialists mainly for complex, narrow-profile and more expensive solutions.
This is evidenced by the results of analytics from the Freelancehunt platform, which compared the indicators for the first nine months of 2026 with the same period last year.
The text and template segments suffered the most from automation. The number of orders for translations, basic copywriting, and simple layout more than halved. For example, in the translation category, the number of projects fell by 63.5%, as companies began to cover these needs themselves using tools like ChatGPT or DeepL.
However, in parallel with the decline in the number of small orders, the median check in these categories doubled. Analysts explain this by the fact that the sample mostly remained large and complex projects: legal translation, expert proofreading of texts after AI, complex UI/UX logic instead of simple prototyping.
"Thanks to AI, individual operations can be performed faster, but professional expertise and the ability to solve complex tasks are becoming increasingly important. The areas where the result can be easily reproduced by a neural network have declined the most. This does not mean the disappearance of professions, but rather their change: the market pays less and less for a separate file and more and more for the result, for which the performer is responsible," Freelancehunt comments on the trend.
Technologies are not only displacing old work formats, but also creating new ones. The absolute leader in growth was projects to create AI videos, where the number of orders increased by 26.3%, and the median check grew by 26.6%. If earlier these were experiments with prompts, now businesses are ordering full-fledged commercial advertising and the creation of digital avatars. The demand for consulting in the field of artificial intelligence also increased by 13.8%.
Interestingly, against the backdrop of general automation, the number of recruiting projects increased by 19.1%, confirming the stable business demand for human assessment of specialists.
In terms of financial indicators, the most profitable remain technical niches, which occupy nine out of ten positions in the ranking of the highest average budgets. Customers are willing to pay the most to specialists in the field of "Cryptocurrency and blockchain" - about 17,472 UAH per project (this is the average segment of orders from 5 to 50 thousand UAH). The top ten is closed by the development of bots with an average check of over 14,800 UAH.
The study is based on data from the Freelancehunt platform, which currently unites over 290 thousand active freelancers and 50 thousand customers. The global trend in the labor market confirms these findings: large technology companies and small businesses continue to optimize costs for creating basic content and code, increasing the requirements for the qualifications of senior specialists and solution architects.
