Salaries, skill sets, open roles: All you need to know to build a career in Generative AI

According to Xpheno, there are over 2,000 active job openings across different functions in this sector globally

India’s active Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) talent pool grew the fastest over the last 12 months among top recruiting countries. Business ventures in Generative AI - a system capable of generating text, images and other media in response to prompts - have grown significantly over the last two quarters.

According to data from Xpheno, a specialist staffing company, India’s active Generative AI talent pool grew 54 percent over the last 12 months, the highest among countries including the US and Germany.

This follows OpenAI’s ChatGPT gaining massive popularity globally and tech giants like Google and Baidu coming up with their own pet projects like BARD and Ernie, respectively.

Xpheno said the total global talent pool in Generative AI grew by 46 percent over the last year, to reach 19,000 as of April 2023. US, India, UK, Germany, Canada and France account for 60 percent of the total active Generative AI talent pool, it added.

Moneycontrol brings all you need to know about open roles, salaries offered, skill sets required to build a career in the space:

Companies hiring

According to Xpheno, there are over 2,000 active job openings across different functions in this sector globally.

“While globally, generative AI specialised talent is employed the most by product and big tech companies like Autodesk, Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Meta, back in India, IT service majors like TCS, L&T, Infosys and Tech Mahindra, among others are prominent recruiters for this space,” said Kamal Karanth, co-founder of Xpheno.

Apart from big organisations like Google, Microsoft, Baidu and Alibaba, there are over 120 Generative AI applications and products, at different stages of maturity, with an active workforce for AI.

Career in Generative AI

Xpheno said companies like Dubverse, Anyword, Outplay, Rephrase.ai, Glean, Simplified have significant talent from India.

In addition, startups within edtech or other sectors that work around content generation are also beginning to experiment with generative AI. These are using their current tech talent and may hire for such roles on a smaller scale in the coming future.

Prateek Shukla, founder & CEO of Masai School, a career school, said, “The team which is working on Generative AI integration into Masai are using all the innovation that has happened on Generative AI so far. That is something which can be done by any smart coder who has some experience and can use any APIs which are created by open AI.”

He added, “Secondly, if you have team members, those who have already worked on data science, I think, they will be able to adapt to generative AI much faster.”

Besides information technology and tech startups, sectors like retail, telecom, banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI), and advertising, market research and public relations are the biggest contributors to this growth in the last six months, according to data from foundit (formerly Monster), an Indian talent platform.

Salaries and open roles

A pool of over 5,500 specialist tech talent out of the total 19,000 work with these 120 ventures, a majority of which are micro to small-sized ventures with less than 50 in employee count.

Within different generative AI categories, Text-focused ventures dominate the space with about 66 percent working with them, followed by Speech that employs 11 percent. Other categories like Image, Video, Coding and 3D (three-dimensional) content generation employ the rest.

Generative AI Landscape

“The ability of BigTech players to acquire and roll up smaller products and ventures in Generative AI will see a consolidation of applications and platforms as we go,” Karanth said.

When it comes to skills required for Generative AI, currently, the highest talent demand is for engineering and IT skill sets, accounting for 54 percent of the total demand, Xpheno’s data shows.

Out of total active job openings, over 800 are for Generative AI specialist skill sets and associated Machine Learning (ML) skill sets. The rest of the roles are spread across a wider range of functions like product management, design, sales and operations.

Karanth said the current stage of these ventures has not generated the need for a high volume of talent in sales enablement and customer support roles. “Generative AI ventures use highly specialised AI & ML talent pools that are also relevant for other sectors -- Engineering, IT Services and Products, Automotive, Design, Architecture and Planning. The Generative AI ecosystem draws talent from these sectors…,” he added.

According to foundit, generative AI-based companies are currently hiring software engineers, data engineers, data scientists, marketing analytics consultants, Amazon Web Services (AWS) data architect, ML engineers, AI product managers, business intelligence (BI) developers, content curators and proofreaders.

The salaries for such roles, as per foundit, ranges between Rs 8.6 lakh per annum and Rs 27 lakh per annum, based on the applicants’ profile and years of experience within specialist skill sets.

Demand for AI skill sets increase

“Although there is huge hiring demand for these roles, there’s a scarcity of talent as well. The growing demand for these roles across industries has created a setback in hiring due to the lack of specialised skills in professionals. Although there is a lot of new talent in the market, organisations are finding it challenging to hire a candidate with the right fit for the job”, said Sekhar Garisa, CEO of foundit.

Some of the skills that have been in demand for such roles are ML Ops, Natural Language Processing, Java, Python, DevOps, Big Data, Azure, Unix, TensorFlow, and Neural Networks.

Upskilling companies like Masai School and Jaro Education said demand for generative AI-related skills has picked up recently. “...The demand for courses related to AI and ML has increased significantly after the pandemic. Top institutes such as Rotman School of Management, IIM Ahmedabad, IIM Kozhikode, IIM Trichy, IIM Nagpur, IIT Madras Pravartak, E&ICT IIT Guwahati, and IIT Jammu are providing courses in these fields,” said Ranjita Raman, CEO of Jaro Education, a bootstrapped upskilling platform.

Garissa suggests job seekers upskill to remain “market ready” even during tough times. “It is necessary to keep up with emerging trends as every role becomes obsolete beyond a certain period of time without new learnings… Today’s employees must be prepared to adapt to learn, unlearn and relearn to remain relevant in future,” he added.