AI, ChatGPT, Innovative technology, Tech stocks, Google Bard, OpenAI. Perhaps this is all that we hear all the times and such is a frenzy in the job market for the new skills that the recruiters are going gaga over the talent attraction.
One of the 36-year-old data-science specialist, Aditya Chopra who works in AI, gets getting phone calls from recruiters despite not looking for any new job.
After OpenAI demonstrated the breakthroughs of ChatGPT, AI jobs are perhaps the most coveted jobs that there are right now.
He said that he sees friends in the field get pay hikes of 35% to 50% each time they switch jobs and adds that “There’s a real shortage of data and AI talent”.
Shortage of Data & AI Talent
Right from Silicon Valley to Europe, Asia and beyond, the AI frenzy is ricocheting all around the globe in talent circles.
While tech giants like Google and Baidu Inc. dangle top-notch packages for the engineers to build their own AI engines, companies in almost every other field — from health care and finance to entertainment — are staffing up too, to avoid getting blindsided by shifts in their industries.
India, a country of 1.4 billion people has long been the back office for the tech industry, a source of reinforcements for any emergency, but even the country has witnessed how the rush for talent is outstripping supply.
But now it seems that even India is running out of the data scientists, machine-learning specialists and skilled engineers that companies are looking
Rahul Shah, co-founder of WalkWater Talent Advisors, a headhunter for top-level workers said that there’s an “insatiable need for talent”. While talking about AI and talent, he said that “AI can’t be outsourced, its core to the organization.”
Recruitment stories verge on the absurd. In one search Shah’s firm just handled, the new employer more than doubled a candidate’s pay.
Freedom Dumlao, chief technology officer of Flexcar, interviewed one engineer who said a rival suitor had offered him a BMW motorcycle as a sign-on bonus. “That’s a line I’m not comfortable approaching,” Dumlao said.
India’s tech world is built on a plentiful supply of affordable workers. Companies like Tata Consultancy Services Ltd. invented the model for modern outsourcing, in which Western companies tap engineers halfway around the world to handle support, services and software, typically at a fraction of the cost of local workers.
According to the trade group Nasscom, there are now more than five million people employed in tech services in India.
The AI Talent Crunch to Worsen in Near Future
Powerhouses like Google, Microsoft Corp. and Amazon.com Inc. set up their own operations in India, hiring locals by the thousands. In a similar example Google, which started with five employees in India in 2004, now has nearly 10,000 employees.
However, such a massive country is also running short in critical fields like AI. As we speak, there are around 416,000 people working in AI and data science in the country —- and demand for another 213,000, according to Nasscom’s estimates. “The proportion of unfilled job roles is approximately 51% of the current installed talent base,” it said in a February report, flagging the crunch as a risk to growth.
This gap is extrapolated to widen! Let’s see how and why?
Vikram Ahuja, co-founder of ANSR Consulting, which helps design and establish technology centers for corporations said that “ChatGPT has driven the larger domain of artificial intelligence out of stealth mode”.
There are some questions that companies are asking which revolve around the AI and how it will affect their fates and functioning.
Some of these questions include: Can ChatGPT predict future demand with newfound accuracy? Will deep learning technologies prove better at medical diagnosis than any doctor today? Could trading algorithms be fine-tuned to the point finance companies with the best technologies will drive their rivals out of business?
“The talent crunch is going to worsen in the next year or two,” said Biswajeet Mahapatra, principal analyst at Forrester Research Inc.
