I recently posted my personal high level thoughts about top digital trends in 2023. In this article I would like to expand on the part of fourth trend: Technology and talent, the talent.
As industries transform, the demand for expertise in areas such as artificial intelligence and similar will increase. Most existing digital roles will get an AI flavour, especially with the support of new AI tools, like ChatGPT. Organizations that can attract, retain, and develop top talent will gain a competitive edge, driving innovation and productivity.
There will be the continued high demand for AI talent, despite the recent massive layoffs in some of the top tech companies. While there is a temporary hiring freeze from most technology companies, I suspect, there will be need for AI talent later this year, especially with the recent ChatGPT hype.
I can foresee, companies needing the following roles in organisations to build AI products:
- Data scientists, to build analytics models.
- Analytics translators, to bridge technical expertise and business. To understand how the model can add business value and communicate it back to the business and development teams.
- Data engineers, to develop data pipelines, surrounding architecture and set up data governance principles.
- MLOps professionals, to ensure the models are streamlined to production.
More companies will also realise that they need to switch to more product mindset even with their analytics projects. I see that both data and analytics moving this way, especially with popularisation of data mesh and similar frameworks that focus on building products with proper product teams.
I predict that the following product talent will be in demand. These professionals should work really closely with both business and the AI professionals.
- AI product managers, sets up vision and plan for the product and communicates with both the end users, the business, and the development teams.
- Agile professionals, who work with AI development teams to ensure productive Agile workflow.
Other digital talent like cybersecurity professionals will be in demand, especially given the recent breaches to Optus, Medibank and Lattitude.
There is also potential for new professions, like AI prompt engineering or NLP processing engieer that will become more prominent in 2023 and beyond. Bloomberg reports that companies are paying prompt engineers up to $355,000 a year.
In conclusion, most of in-demand professions will be with AI flavour. As I mentioned in my previous articles, this is my wild guess based on my recent experiences.
This article reflects my personal views and opinions only, which may be different from the companies and employers that I am associated with.