Startups are Dealing with the AI Talent gap Globally and in India - Future of Business Process Automation is in Risk...???
For 90s school kids pursuing Math and Coding, Artificial Intelligence spurred the imagination of a whole generation as the “coolest” frontier of Technology and Computer Science. It’s been 21 years since IBM Deep Blue defeated Gary Kasparov at Chess in 1997, about 7 years since IBM Watson won Jeopardy in 2011 and just a couple of years since Google Deepmind’s AlphaGo defeated Lee Sedol at Go in 2016.
The trend in the timeline is pretty clear–Artificial Intelligence is being able to do unimaginable things much sooner than expected. Even for the industry, the word is out. Companies who will be able to leverage AI will be much more competent and in a position to dominate markets than ones who don’t.
Many people must have seen that a lot of companies show intent to leverage AI at the level of top management but the outcomes on KPIs seems not that great yet. So what’s really holding them back?
There are multiple reasons for this, but a lack of capital investment is certainly not one of them. In the US alone, career advisory platform Paysa has revealed that there are open roles at top companies with the following aggregate net salaries:
Amazon: $227,769,001
Google: $130,048,389
Microsoft: $75,158,057
Facebook: $38,636,827
NVIDIA: $34,280,190
Undoubtedly, there is a fierce battle for elite talent and the biggest companies are prepared to pay whatever it takes to win.
The results from an O’Reilly survey- “How Companies Are Putting AI to Work Through Deep Learning” from 2018 revealed that the lack of enough skilled AI professionals is the largest barrier in AI adoption. Speculative figures from a Tencent report suggest that of the number of available AI roles in millions we only have about 300,000 AI practitioners globally.
LinkedIn’s 2017 U.S. Emerging Jobs Report claims that last year saw a 9.8x growth in demand for machine learning engineers making it the fastest emerging job beating all other roles with salaries frequently crossing 300K USD for senior talent.
The New York Times estimates that there are only 10,000 people in the world right now with “the education, experience, and talent needed” to develop the AI technologies that businesses are betting on to create a host of new economic opportunities.
Indian companies, on the other hand, are facing a much more amplified and different situation from that being faced by their counterparts from the US and UK.
As per a Quartz article notes, only 4% of AI professionals in India have actually worked on cutting-edge technologies like deep learning and neural networks, which are the key ingredients for building advanced AI-related solutions.
Many such companies require candidates with Ph.D. degrees in AI-related technologies, which is rare in India. India counts for just 386 of the roughly 22,000 Ph.D. educated AI-researchers worldwide, according to the Global AI Talent Report 2018 that crawled data from jobs site LinkedIn for its findings.
Even in the Indian context, between 2014 and 2017, AI startups in India have raised less than $100 million from venture capitalists. Further, most of these new AI focussed Indian tech companies are not research oriented. There is also a severe dearth of data, which hinders research. And finally, even those who do set up AI-based ventures struggle to find the right talent and skills.
Roles in Data Science and Data Engineering (of which AI is a part) are at the intersection of maths, statistics, and programming. Worldwide trends in strategy reports suggest that one of the ways to address the AI skills gap is to increase resources for digital, mathematical and technical education such as the UK Government announced in its 2017 Industrial Strategy Whitepaper.
China has been luring top global AI researchers for quite some time now, many from Silicon Valley firms. It has built a $2 billion research park dedicated to AI in western Beijing and is spending more millions on AI research at universities and private firms. The research community in China is also far more robust than in India. The Chinese government spends 2% of its GDP on research while India’s marks a dismal 0.6%.
Most Indian colleges do not have AI as the focus of their various academic programs. IIT Kharagpur, under the leadership of the visionary Prof. P.P. Chakrabarti recently started setting a first of its kind Center of Excellence in Artificial Intelligence (AI) Research which was seed funded by one of India’s leading AI startups Capillary Technologies.
More such initiatives will definitely incentivise the AI R&D ecosystem in India.
As of today, according to Belong (an HR-tech startup), of the 7,000-10,000 data scientists in India, only about 2% are known to have PhDs.
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