Demand for artificial intelligence and machine learning experts is on the rise globally despite a fear that AI will eat away at many jobs. The rate at which global companies are hiring gives us a different picture. The technological advancement is still creating more positions as companies need high-skilled AI talents to develop and maintain a wide range of applications. According to Indeed, employers demand for AI talents has more than doubled over the past three years and the number of job postings as a share of all job postings have increased by 119 percent. The top 10 jobs in demand right now are:
- Data Scientist
- Software Engineer
- Machine Learning Engineer
- Software Architect
- Data Analyst
- Data Warehouse Engineer
- Full Stack Developers
- Research Scientist
- Front End Developer
- Product Manager
AI and machine learning has also strongly gaining ground in India, which is one of the top 15 countries in terms of talent, corporates who use ML, and authors who write about it. Cheaper cost of set up and availability of talent has made India a favourite place for tech giants such as Microsoft, Google and IBM to set up shop.
Here’s let’s take a look at the countries that are increasingly hiring more AI talents:
United States
US has been the leader in attracting AI and machine learning talent. A study by Pysa shows that the top 20 AI companies are spending more than $650 million to hire AI talent and that there are more than 10,000 positions available at top employers across the country. The total annual investment among the 20 employers that are looking to hire AI talents is $33,292,647, which indicates that the future success of the companies heavily depends on AI technologies and the talent to create them.
According to Glassdoor and Pysa, the top recruiters in US are Amazon, Google, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Facebook, Intel, Rocket Fuel, General Electric, Cylance, Oculus VR, Booz Allen Hamilton, Huawei, Adobe, Accenture, iRobot, Magic Leap, Rethink Robotics, BAE Systems, HERE, IBM, Samsung, Lenovo, MoTek Technologies, Uber, PCO innovation, Rakuten Marketing, and Wells Fargo. However, none of the reports listed Apple among the top recruiter. The Cupertino-based company comes way down at 96 on the list. This low ranking may be because of the company’s affinity for secrecy which is hurting the iPhone maker in the race to hire AI talent.
Recruiters in the US are seeking tech and engineering talents with deep learning, machine learning, AI, neural networks, computer vision and reinforcement skills. Additionally, the country is estimated to have 2,50,000 open data science jobs by 2024.
Canada
After the US, Canada is gradually becoming a go-to place for AI experts. According to an Indeed report, jobs in Canada requiring AI skills have grown by 1,069 percent since 2013 — a growth rate faster than the UK and US. Companies that are actively hiring for AI skills in Canada are — Royal Bank of Canada, IBM, Scotiabank, KPMG, Amazon, LoyaltyOne, TD Bank, Kinaxis, Huawei and Capital One, among others. Universities across the country are allowing researchers and scientist to lay the groundwork for a breakthrough in AI. The Justin Trudeau-led government invested dramatically in AI research in the past year. Last year, Canada released its national strategy with a plan to invest $125 million in a Pan-Canadian AI Strategy that is focused on increasing the number of researchers and skilled graduates.
Additionally, global tech companies such as DeepMind, Microsoft, Facebook and Google among others are also setting up their research labs in the country and tapping Canadian talents to head new AI arms.
Europe
According to reports, AI-related jobs have tripled over the last three years. The two most sought-after positions by employers are data scientist and machine learning engineers. In the UK, AI jobs pay well above the average salary, data scientist take home £56,385 a year and ML engineers earning an average of £54,617 a year. However, research suggests that the number of AI jobs available in Britain was six times higher than the number of interested candidates.
On the other hand, the number of job opportunities is little less in Germany. “When it comes to machinery, Germany has a strong presence of young professionals and academics which has remained sort of hidden and is not always exploited well,” said Yasser Jadidi, head of AI research at the Bosch Center for AI. However, now the company has been thinking to commercialise AI expertise for business. Other European countries like France and Spain too have a significant number of AI experts. In last one year at least 20 development centers have been set up in the countries like Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Austria and Ireland. Nearly 200,000 students graduate in engineering and sciences every year from Universities in Central and Eastern European countries.
China
Beijing is investing a gargantuan sum of money to make the country No.1 in the application of artificial intelligence. The country is hiring tens and thousands of people to shore up cybersecurity, help censor online content. The salaries that are paid to the top AI talents are within striking distance of those offered in the US.
Out of China’s top 10 employers in AI, half are American, claims LinkedIn’s report. The top US tech companies in China hiring AI talents are Intel, IBM and Microsoft. Alibaba, Baidu, Huawei, and Tencent, are among the top Chinese employers in the country. However, China still lags behind in terms of AI position, which has about 50,000 AI position. On the other hand, US has about 80,000 AI position.
According to a tech recruitment website, the salaries of the top graduates working on AI range from 300,000 yuan ($47,066) to 600,000 yuan ($94,132) an annum. While the salaries of team leaders with three-to-five years of experience can make more than 1.5 million yuan ($23,533,100) annually. Most of the jobs are in Beijing or Shenzhen. The tech firms are also actively recruiting Chinese students from US college. The job creation is a part of governments drive to become AI superpower and move the Chinese economy up the value chain with emphasis on areas like IT, robotics and energy-saving vehicles.
Japan
After becoming a world leader in electronics, the country is now focused on building its robotics industry. Foreign software engineers and other information technology specialists are increasingly joining Japan’s robotic startups. Start Today Co, which operates popular online fashion shopping website Zozotown is also hiring tech workers in fields ranging from AI to cryptography and offering annual salaries of as much as 100 million yen ($944,000). The country has roughly 117 active researchers presenting at Neural Information Processing Systems and other leading conferences.
India
India too is not far behind other countries in terms AI hiring, the country is expected to see a 60 per cent rise by this year due to increasing adoption of automation. The presence of multi-billion dollar IT companies, global software product companies with their research and development bases in India and venture capital industry focused on AI and machine learning has given rise to a talent pool. Further, as India is heading towards Digital India, the IT industry will require 50 percent more workforce equipped with digital skills. “The growing opportunities in the digital technology arena including government initiative like Digital India will add jobs in digital technologies, AI, robotics. The IT industry is expected to add around 1.8-2 lakh jobs this year,” said Alka Dhingra, general manager, IT staffing at TeamLease Services. Most of the machine learning talent pool is spread across five cities: Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad, Mumbai/Pune belt and Delhi NCR region.
