The Next Economy
In the past two years, Cyprus has welcomed a remarkable wave of foreign companies. According to the Cyprus Ministry of Energy, Trade and Industry, 246 new foreign companies established themselves here between January and July of 2025 alone. Software, fintech, gaming, digital services. These are not traditional businesses setting up a regional office. They are arriving with entirely different operating cultures, and built into those cultures, quietly, is an assumption about what a competent professional looks like in 2025. That assumption does not favour experience alone. It favours AI fluency. And most Cypriots over 40 don’t yet understand what that means for them.
The landscape changed while they were not looking. This is not a technology story. It is a story about a generation being structurally sidelined and not being told it is happening.
Two problems, not one
The marginalisation runs along two tracks simultaneously, and understanding both matters.
The first is hiring. More than half of employers now use AI-powered screening tools before a human being reads a single application. Adoption jumped from 26 per cent in 2024 to 43 per cent in 2025. These algorithms are trained on historical data, meaning they learn to replicate who got hired in the past. And in the past, most companies hired younger. Graduation year, length of employment history, email domains, none of these fields say “age.” All of them reveal it. The companies arriving in Cyprus from Tel Aviv, London, and Kyiv are not leaving these tools at the border. They are running them here, now, on local applicants.
Glassdoor reported a 133 per cent surge in ageism complaints during recruitment in the first quarter of 2025. A class-action lawsuit in the United States, Mobley v. Workday, has already gained preliminary certification, alleging that an AI hiring platform systematically excluded applicants over 40. This is no longer theoretical, and frightening enough on its own. Yet there is a second wall behind it, and most people do not know it is there until they are already standing in front of it.
Not long ago, knowing how to use AI meant opening ChatGPT and typing a question. That window of simplicity was brief. AI has since moved into territory that demands genuine technical literacy. Businesses now expect their people to work with AI agents that operate autonomously across systems, to prompt models with enough precision to get useful outputs, and in many roles, to understand the basics of Python or similar coding languages well enough to build workflows that did not exist eighteen months ago.
This is the current expectation in a growing number of industries. Not a future prediction. A present reality.
What nobody is saying out loud
Here is what is not being said clearly enough, particularly in Cyprus. A professional in their late forties or fifties who has spent two decades building genuine expertise is facing both of these pressures at once, and is likely unaware of either. They are not being rejected for lacking talent. They are being filtered out by systems they cannot see, and quietly passed over in workplaces that assume AI literacy the way a previous generation assumed email.
An AARP survey from January 2026, drawing on over 1,600 workers aged 50 and above, found that a third were assumed to be less tech-savvy, nearly a quarter were assumed to resist change, and one in five was passed over for training in favour of younger colleagues.
Research from the Urban Institute adds something that should concern every Cypriot employer: organisations are reluctant to invest in upskilling workers they assume are closer to retirement. The gap widens not because older workers cannot learn, but because nobody is helping them get there.
This points to something corrosive. It is not malice. The algorithm is not malicious. But indifference at scale produces the outcome as malice.
The new class divide
Cyprus is not insulated from this. If anything, the speed of the foreign company influx means the shift is arriving here faster and with less public discussion than in the countries these businesses came from. Genuine operational fluency is now the price of visibility, and most people here don’t yet know that.
The machine is not waiting. The companies arriving here are not waiting. And the professional in their late forties who has spent twenty years being good at their job, who has no idea that an algorithm has already decided they are not worth seeing, is the one paying the price for that silence. That line is being drawn right now. The only question is which side of it you are on.
Upskilling is not optional anymore. It is the price of relevance.