Money Maker: Indian AI Talent is one of the most sought-after in the world, Engineers getting paid handsomely

It looks like the world cannot have enough of India’s AI talent pool. Global tech companies, especially those dabbling with Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning are looking for Indian AI Talent and they are ready to pay top dollar for it.

India already had a massive pool of people talented in AI and ML, even before generative AI such as ChatGPT, became popular.

However, since OpenAI practically put the term “AI” on everyone’s tongue, people, particularly software engineers have been brushing up their skill sets and tweaking their resumes to get hired by either AI studios or by companies who are trying to figure out how to integrate AI into their workflows.

India has a massive pool of engineers, but what about AI Engineers?
According to a recent report by Nasscom-Zinnov the current tech workforce in India stands at 47 lakh employees. However, this number is set to go down drastically for a number of reasons. The Nasscom report also states that at present, India has over 4.16 lakh people employed in AI, and will need about 2.13 lakh more in a couple of years.

The situation right now is such that the world, is looking at a worrying talent crunch as far as AI is concerned. That is the reason why companies are willing to pay an obscene amount of money for anyone who can work with AI, whether they have a degree in the field or not.

Top dollar for AI talent
Case in point would be Netflix. The streaming giant recently put up a notice of hiring an AI expert who would help them monetise AI. For that position, Netflix was willing to pay the potential candidate over $900,000, plus benefits.

And it’s not just Netflix that’s offering these ludicrous packages — Amazon, Google and a bunch of financial investment firms on Wall Street are willing to pay up.

Consider this: Insider reports that between July 2022 and July 2023, the number of job listings for GenAI positions experienced a significant increase of 50 per cent, as reported by Insider, a job search platform.

Everyone wants to get on the AI bandwagon
Along with this increase, there has also been an increase in searches for these roles, by about 12,300 per cent during the same timeframe, underscoring the escalating curiosity around these opportunities.

Analytics India Magazine also found that since the introduction of ChatGPT, there has been a 21-fold increase in the number of job listings on LinkedIn that mention GPT or ChatGPT. Furthermore, this surge in job postings is not the only noticeable trend; globally, LinkedIn users are now more inclined than ever to incorporate AI skills into their profiles.

The LinkedIn study that Analytics India Magazine quotes, involved 25 countries and meticulously tracked 121 AI skills, revealing some significant trends.

In the year 2022, among the rapidly growing AI-related skills being added to user profiles, the top five skills were all indicative of the rise of generative AI.

These skills involved abilities such as question-answering, which experienced a remarkable surge of 332 per cent, alongside classification and recommender systems. These trends collectively highlight the increasing prominence of generative AI in the professional landscape.