AI Talent Landscape

2019 continues to see the AI Landscape evolving at breakneck speed. PwC state’s that AI will add $15.7T to the global economy by 2030. To make this possible you need an active thriving AI ecosystem across all industries, with the right people, in the right places working on the right products, services etc. Let’s look at the numbers to see where this is at:

AI Talent pool: There has been much debate on the numbers & size of the AI Talent pool & the AI Talent Shortage. Last year Tencent Holdings announced based off their research that there were 300,000 “AI Practitioners and researchers worldwide” but millions of roles available for people with these qualifications. According to research done by Glassdoor, data scientists have the No. 1 job in the United States. A quick look at Indeed or LinkedIn will pull up thousands of AI roles globally.  

Academia: Interest in AI courses is seeing an academic gold rush. There are currently over 2.5+ million subscribers to online machine learning courses such as Coursera, MIT, etc & there are over 100+ AI papers archived daily. 

Element AI published the 2019 Global AI Talent Report, by analyzing more than 11,000 published papers across 21 conferences and cross-referencing with social networking data, they pulled together the following stats; 22,400 is the number of people and papers published & this has experienced double digit growth from previous years, 18% of researchers are women, the top countries leading academic research are US, China, UK, and Canada. 

Academic institutes and governments are feeling the pressure to continue to dedicate resources to artificial intelligence training. This month we saw the opening of the world’s first AI university in Abu Dhabi, & last year MIT announced creating an AI college focused on integrated teaching of computer science with fields like biology, chemistry, politics, history and linguistics.

Investment: The US currently has the most AI Startups, private equity, and venture capital funding globally with over $17B invested between 2017-2018.  By comparison, China has seen $13.5B invested during the same time period and Europe was at $2.8B. In the last 3 months alone 424 AI companies were funded. 

Overall there is incredible business value and potential to be realized by AI. The AI ecosystem is well funded yet there continues to be high demand for talent and a low supply in order to further progress commercialization. Given the investment effort in academia we can expect to see a positive impact on the AI talent shortage in the next three to four years. 

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About Margaret Laffan

Vice President, Business Development,@TalentSeer & Robin.ly Venture Partner, @BoomingStar Ventures

Margaret Laffan is the Vice President of Business Development at TalentSeer—a specialized AI talent partner dedicated to building and nurturing AI teams for companies at various growth stages—and a venture partner with BoomingStar Ventures—a $1.5b fund focused on AI, robotics, and autonomous driving early stage startups. Margaret leads the development of new partnerships to accelerate the expansion of TalentSeer’s AI talent ecosystem. Previously, Margaret drove sales and business development at SAP and has held leadership roles in various startups. Laffan is published on Forbes and contributes to other media. She earned her master’s degree in political science from the University of Dublin, and has 15+ years working in industry, nonprofit and startup sector. Follow Margaret on Twitter @MargaretLaffan