Study AI if you want to get hired in the defense industry, the CEO of Scandinavia’s biggest military manufacturer says

• AI and data engineers will be the defense industry's sought-after jobs, Micael Johansson told BI.
• The Saab CEO said the defense world is moving toward a business model that offers software.
• He said Saab, which makes the Gripen, recently hired 6,000 more people amid the boom.

Artificial intelligence and software skills will be a young graduate's best bets for a job in the rapidly surging defense industry, said Micael Johansson, CEO of Saab.

"I think there will be a big change going forward," Johansson told Business Insider on the sidelines of this year's Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore.

"Our systems will be software-defined, so of course, AI engineers, great software skills, data engineers will be super important to us," said the CEO, who was elected president of the Aerospace, Security and Defence Industries Association of Europe last month.

Johansson said defense primes like Saab, which manufactures the Gripen fighter aircraft, will still need technicians and mechanics to build weapons platforms.

"We need excellent, skillful production people as well. Finding welders to do submarine work is not an easy thing, so it's a mix of jobs," he said.

But he added that Saab and the larger industry are moving toward a live service business model that emphasizes software in weapons systems that can be incrementally updated and connected with other platforms.

Part of that industry push comes from observing the war in Ukraine, where both sides are developing new techniques in drone jamming and countermeasures in a matter of weeks.

"The technology will grow so quickly, so you cannot buy a sort of, 50,000 drones and put them in stock. You want to have almost like drones as a service," Johansson said.

Saab, the Nordics' biggest defense manufacturer, has enjoyed an industry-wide boom since the start of the Ukraine war. The Swedish firm reported 2024 annual sales of 63.75 billion Swedish krona, or about $6.6 billion. By comparison, annual revenue in 2021 was 39.15 billion krona.

Amid the uncertainty of Washington's long-term role in NATO, the firm's share price has surged by more than 120% since President Donald Trump's inauguration in January to 484.30 krona, as of Monday afternoon.

Johansson said Saab has been investing heavily to meet demand and has grown its workforce from 19,000 to 25,000 in the last two years.

"We've had more than 200,000 applicants last year for the company and 74,000 for this first quarter," he said.

The CEO had said in February that he expected the Stockholm-based firm to hire 1,000 more people in Sweden this year. On Friday, he told BI he'd revised the figure to 2,000 after realizing Saab had already hired 900 new staff in the first quarter.

"Probably will be wrong again," he said.