Caught In The Talent Crunch?

Aiming for market disruption with your artificial intelligence (AI) solution? Spoiler alert!

- Sandeep Soni

There is less than just a handful 10,000 number of specialized talent in AI in the entire world. Baffled? The war for AI talent, henceforth, would be ruthless enough to easily dwarf the challenge for spotting good software engineers. As it happens, you know that machine thinking has begun to usurp human thinking. Despite India’s global dominance in offering cheap engineering talent at scale, young AI companies in India are looking for alternate ways to suck in what’s available.

A mid-year 2017 survey by recruitment platform Belong. co tries to read between the lines and throws up some startling numbers. Particularly for data scientists wherein the essence of AI skills lies - ranked 0.8 on Belong’s talent supply index. This, as per Belong, indicates of only 800 data scientists available for 1,000 data scientist opportunities, which means significant mismatch in demand and supply of AI talent in the country. The other two figures that drives home the point of talent crunch includes just four percent tech talent with expertise in deep learning and neural networks system and “less than two percent having a PhD degree in AI-related technologies,” says Belong. And to develop great AI products, that’s how premium talent and expertise should be - both quite scarce in India.

Another Way Out

Globally, all good AI talent goes to the big four - Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Facebook that includes inbound hiring, hiring from colleges, poaching it from each other and rest of the big tech companies, and acquihiring young companies. For e.g., Google acquired Bengaluru-based AI start-up Halli Labs in July this year and Hyderabad based TupleJump acquired by Apple last year. Other big and small tech companies are left to pick from people who have basic understanding in deep learning with requisite math skills and then groom them over few months through training and development.