Unless you’ve been under a rock, we don’t have to tell you that AI is booming.
Forbes calls it ‘the most transformative technology humanity has ever developed’.
AI is making an impact in a broad range of industries, from Healthcare, Food Tech and Travel to Financial Services, Manufacturing and Entertainment, according to Leeway Hertz.
PwC Global expect the total contribution of AI to the global economy to reach $15.7 trillion by 2030.
The potential and forecasted growth of AI are huge. But let's dive into what this means for businesses and talent, right now.
What is the AI Talent War?
AI is a growing area of tech with exciting and important applications. In healthcare, AI has been used to model viruses, among other things. As stated by Forbes, it’s ‘already being used to help us tackle climate change, explore space, and develop cancer treatments.’
Some of the benefits that AI can offer to businesses include reducing costs through automation and efficiency.
Here comes the ‘but’.
The talent pool simply isn’t growing fast enough to keep up with demand. This means that the race is on for brands to acquire the best AI talent.
Even the biggest players in the tech industry are not immune. Competition for AI talent is so fierce, that tech giants are even losing out to one another. Case in point: Google’s former Head of Search and AI made the move to Apple in 2018.
With names like that competing over the best talent out there, what can companies possibly offer to give them an edge? And where can new talent be found?
Whatever your business objectives in terms of AI, here are three strategies to get around the talent shortage:
Offer a great collaborative culture.
From an insightful Medium article by David Kelnar, ‘AI professionals rely on collaboration for ideas and can feel isolated if they are a sole member of a larger team’.
If you can guarantee the right sense of collaboration within your business, you may become more attractive than companies that are neglecting this.
Key steps include:
- Hire a cohesive team, not solo individuals. Allow your ‘Head of’ to build out their team according to the problem you need to solve, and their chosen approach.
- Start small to validate ideas and data before hiring starts to snowball. This can also help the team to gel and develop a cohesive intention.
- Make sure your strategy is watertight before you grow the team, so hires can fit seamlessly within it.
Make your own AI talent.
Yes, it’s a complex field of knowledge. No, you can’t conjure up world-leading talent by magic. But you might be able to craft the specific kind of talent you need, from within your business.
From another article by Forbes, this is what David Sweenor, Senior Director of Product Marketing at Alteryx, calls “the democratization of AI and Analytics.”
He says, “If more people are AI literate and can start to participate and contribute to the process, more problems–both big and small–across the organization can be tackled,”
Here’s how to create AI talent from inside your team:
- Maximise the knowledge in-house by sharing it through internal workshops and mentorship.
- Run projects that allow developing AI talent to problem-solve and learn in practice.
- Provide learning. Free courses on the rudimentary aspects of AI, like this, are available online. Employees can also learn about AI and Machine learning from Google Education. You might even offer a budget for mini-degrees and qualifications; see a round-up of course providers for 2022 here.
Discover hidden potential.
You may have all the ideal skills already sitting within your team, but being applied to other priorities, or sitting in different verticals.
Forbes stated that “If you currently have employees who are business analysts or have experience with data engineering, then they could be good candidates to train for AI tasks. This would include focusing on skills like Python and TensorFlow, which is a deep learning framework.”
Here are some signs of the right potential:
- Skilled in mathematics, computer science, economics or statistics.
- Loves dealing with large data sets.
- A strategic thinker.
- A problem solver.
- Management and/or collaboration skills.
Allow current employees to transition to other teams. By providing a clear roadmap for this, you can reallocate effort toward new priorities and improve your retention rate.
As Hubspot explain, it’s in your business’ interests to “encourage employees to develop additional skills that will aid in their professional development. By doing so, employees can progress into new roles within your organization instead of seeking opportunities elsewhere.”
In sum, the best tactic to come out on top of the AI Talent War might not be to throw a huge compensation budget at the problem.
For businesses of any size, enhancing what you’ve already got, and working from within to become a more attractive prospect for the right kind of talent could be a winning ticket.
