Henry Novelli

written by

Henry Novelli

Culture Blog - Oct 17, 2017

Artificial Intelligence Bringing New Working Opportunities

In an increasingly fast and accelerated world it won’t take long before Artificial Intelligence will positively influence our everyday lives.

Willingly or not, we are moving toward a shift in working positions, away from traditional sectors toward more advanced ones. The Automation Ethicist will be one of these newly created jobs. He will be an expert of AI, studying the social and ethical impact of intelligent machinery. Others are the Usefulness Strategist, who will evaluate the benefits of the new technology, and the Empathy Trainer, who will “educate” and program virtual assistants.

These working positions stem from an Accenture report on this newly born area of interest.

The report focuses on the new tasks needed which require unprecedented skills and training.

Algorithms will be the center of discussion, nevertheless. For the moment there will still be the necessity for competencies that check upon actions undertaken by technologies.

Facebook has announced in May that they will be hiring 3000 moderators to watch over published content: a task that cannot be done, at the moment, merely by software.

Accenture, through its analysis, foresees new professionals in three macro-sectors.

The first sector involves trainers who will be called to instruct the algorithm on how to carry out its tasks. There will be the need of someone who can teach the bot the various nuances of meaning (customer-language tone and meaning trainer) or teach the machines the human behavior of the employees (smart-machine interaction modeler).

Then, explainers will have the task of shortening the gap between businesses and technology development. They will turn the AI analysis and discoveries into added value for enterprises and their managers.

The last sector coming in to play are the sustainers who will evaluate and check upon the impact of AI technologies by promoting or rejecting the algorithms developed, according to precise parameters (machine relations manager).

Yahoo’s engineers have created an algorithm which is able to perceive sarcasm on social media chat with a precision rate of 80%. According to an investigation from the Italian journal Il sole 24 ore, the open positions for AI-related jobs are more than a thousand in companies such as Microsoft and Facebook. The opportunities vary from machine learning specialists, to AI product managers, to engineers for deep learning solutions, as well as more generic figures such as cloud specialists, software engineers, etc.

Remunerations can vary among the different positions. In the case of an AI engineer salaries can peak over 100 thousand dollars.

It is difficult to define useful degrees to work in the AI sector since these have yet to appear at universities.

Currently useful degrees go from computer engineering to statistics, mathematics and physics, as well as humanistic disciplines and philosophy. The important aspect is the integration between a person’s background and his or her quantitative and computational skills.

Some basic fundamental concepts on machine learning must be understood if one were to work in this field and especially data management will be key to succeed.

Experts suggest to not focus too much on specializations which could be easily mistaken for the trend at the moment. It is worth pointing out how AI is running quicker than the best analysts out there. It will be more important to have a broader and stronger basic knowledge on the matter and then develop the required skills to grasp the opportunities that will be created.