“Skills in traditional ML are being rapidly displaced by needs for generative AI, agentic AI, and AI governance,” he adds. “Workers with AI skills now command significant wage premiums over peers in the same roles without those skills.”
Beyond the challenges with a fast-evolving technology, there’s a problem with shallow AI expertise, adds AJ Sunder, CIO and chief product officer at strategic response management software vendor Responsive. There are plenty of people available who have some AI knowledge, but many lack a deeper understanding of how to deploy it to meet enterprise needs, he suggests.
“There is certainly a shortage of people that can build reliable, safe, production-scale AI systems,” he adds. “This abundance of AI-aware talent, combined with a dearth of people that can translate that into functioning AI applications, creates a massive problem sorting through the noise.”