The AI Professionals Crisis: How to Reduce the AI Skill Gap

Hey Alexa! Can you play me a sad song? We can talk to a lot of devices today, but have you ever wondered what’s behind and under every app that we use every day? When you ask Alexa, what song to play, how does it respond to the kind of song that you want to hear? Have you thought about the technologies used to exhibit such function?

Alexa, is designed to and build based on Natural Language Processing (a component of AI). It is a process where your speech in being converted into sound, words or ideas. Amazon records your voice and send it to the amazon’s server for analysis.

Interpretation of sound takes a lot of computational power – the amount of speed the instructions carry to be able to express it in kiloflops of megaflops. Long sentence short, the idea is to help identify the exact word the user speaks and be able to comprehend it without any intervention.

It is a revolution that started almost a decade back, but now gaining pace and is changing everything. Anyone who has seen movies like WALL-E or Ex-Machina is likely to be familiar with the kind of revolution. No doubt, artificial intelligence is already making huge strides at a revolutionary pace today.

Albeit, the positive impacts it is causing businesses today, it is still evident that we’re in an AI skills crisis. Organizations need to closely work together to distinguish ways to close the skill gap.

Factors leading to the deficit of Artificial Intelligence Professionals

There are near about 300,000 AI professionals worldwide, and only a few millions of roles available in the job market. Although these figures are quite speculative, even competitive salaries and benefits packages stand nowhere when it comes to matching up with the demand for AI skills.

The democratization of AI and deep learning expands to a level where not just the tech giants but even the medium sized businesses are in a hunt for artificial intelligence professionals to do their tasks.

“How Companies Are Putting AI to Work Through Deep Learning” – a survey from O’Reilly talks about how AI skill gap has become the largest barrier for the adoption of AI irrespective of challenges.

A poll by Ernst & Young revealed that 56% of senior professionals believe the fact that the only barrier the industry faces in the implementation of AI is due to the lack of qualified AI professionals.

For the fact, we all know that our academic and training programs are not well aligned with the industry needs, thus, fall behind with the pace of innovation and discoveries of AI. Not only do the current tech professionals require training but they also need hands-on experience in handling the job.

Therefore, there aren’t just enough expert professionals to take on job roles offered by organizations who have just begun working with AI technologies. To address such issues, organizations must encourage employees to upskill themselves by taking up AI certification through credible programs available online.

How organizations are bridging the AI skill gap

According to World Economic Forum, there will be at least 133 million job roles to be generated by 2022 globally. Therefore, it is evident that there will be strong demand for skills such as programming and app development along with other skills such as critical thinking, problem solving. Rapid advances in the technology innovation is driving forces towards a revolution where skills will need a faster upgradation.

AI certification can be a solution to fill in these skill gap for the moment. However, for companies that are in search for skilled professionals, a credible certification could be perfect to get a head start for an AI career.

The point is that with emergence of technologies and newer job roles, the size of workers will only increase. It will be challenging for companies to hire without the relevant skills. Having a credible certification is a full proof of the demonstrated skills that industries are looking to hire for.

It is time for one to harness AI and stay future ready!