Artificial Intelligence and Whopping Paychecks: What’s the Deal?

New York City exclaims to be the capital booming industry in artificial intelligence. This city has a staggering 11% percentage of machine learning job vacancies in a single area. From Silicon Valley, the home of the world’s largest technology companies to Wall Street, there has been an increasing demand for professionals skilled AI and machine learning. Precisely due to a limited pool of talent, candidates with experts’ skills are now demanding lucrative compensation. The job postings in artificial intelligence and machine learning skills doubled since 2015, says Indeed, a global job portal. Employers are keen on hiring potential employees with these skillsets. In addition to this, there have been 182% growth in AI and machine learning jobs within the past three years. However, more job search does not mean that there are qualified talents out there since organizations still face a dearth of talent. The adoption of AI is still on the rise, competition in finding the right talent will persist. This may pose as the main concern for employers looking for AI skillset since these jobs require candidates with in-depth knowledge of skills like machine learning, natural language processing, and data science. The technology sector has consecutively offered huge compensation to candidates with new age skills like machine learning and AI. A career in AI demands a sweet paycheck. According to Indeed, an IT professional with the job skill ‘artificial intelligence engineer’ is said to earn an average salary package of $134,135 per year for software engineering professional and $169,930 per year for a candidate with machine learning skills. The package mentioned here can double prior to the credential the organization requires from you. This is not it, a Japanese firm Start Today operating a fashion shopping site Zozotown posted seven genius AI jobs were being offered a whopping salary of more than 100 million yen, in conversion to dollars it was under the U.S. $1 million. A career in AI commands a huge premium in the IT market today. Which are the key sector for AI salaries? Earning a whopping salary in the AI sector means working in the right sector. Although jobs are many, there are limited sectors that surprisingly offer lucrative packages. To name a few would be, Bay Area, Seattle, New York City, and Los Angeles - 67% of the jobs listed with AI skills to be found in these areas, says Glassdoor. In 2018, Glassdoor came up with the best AI companies to work for - Adobe, NVIDIA, Microsoft, Uber, Accenture with 19% open job vacancies in AI. The average salary offered ranges around $111,118 per annum. The best sectors to expose your career as an artificial intelligence engineer are consulting and government agencies, financial services, etc. these are the sectors that are actively in a hunt for professionals skilled in AI and machine learning. Fidelity, Capital One, Goldman Sachs, EY, Booz Allen Hamilton, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Federal Reserve Bank, and the U.S. Army are some of the top firms recruiting for these positions. AI predicts to destroy 1.8 million jobs and is estimated to create 2.3 million jobs by 2020, Gartner. It is expected that the number of job demand will considerably grow in the near future. Why are professionals earning high packages? The fact is, AI is not a subject or discipline one can self-learn. According to Stack Overflow, it was found that 86.7% of developers were self-taught. However, only for programming languages such as Java, Python or PHP but not the art of artificial intelligence. In simple terms, earning the best AI salary calls for extensive knowledge and adept in technologies pertaining to the right career path. This discipline covers skills and topics such as natural language generation, speech recognition, machine learning, chatbots, decision management, deep learning, text analysis, and processing and biometrics and so on. Given the level of specialization needed, not all can master all these skills. IT professionals in this field may require to upskill themselves today. Anything to do with artificial intelligence is in ‘hot demand’. Employers do not mind shelling our hot premium compensation for AI talent, as the job market rushes towards hiring the relevant candidate.