AI experts are in demand but the talent pool is thin: What’s the game plan for companies?

The money- and time-saving benefits of artificial intelligence (AI), automation and other cutting-edge technologies are spurring companies to recruit and hire the best practitioners. For now the demand is greater than the supply.

Weekly job postings for generative AI positions jumped a whopping 450% since last year, according to tech headhunters Upwork. Close to 300 unique job titles related to AI are posted on Upwork’s freelance gig website, including prompt engineers, content creators, machine learning engineers, deep learning engineers, data scientists and bot developers.

ComputerWorld notes that companies are willing to lean on one or more of the leading generative or conversational AI tools such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Bard, Cohere’s Coral and Bing.ai. “The top skills [or programming languages] employers want include Python [easily the most preferred skill], machine learning, AWS, SQL and Java,” reports ComputerWorld.

For the time being, tech workers can call the shots on salaries/hourly wages and contracts until companies get up to speed. CFOs plan to utilize AI for tasks like financial planning and analysis, cybersecurity and financial reporting according to a survey by Hanover Research.

AI experts may already be in-house

To take advantage of all AI offers, CFOs need to be able to depend on IT directors. Of course, IT pros should already be learning how to use ChatGPT or other tools, and be able to suggest areas where AI and automation can help the company save time and money. (If not, it’s past time to start looking for a new IT director.)

Employees in IT or other departments who seem eager to master AI tools may benefit from online training (paid for by their companies) and reshuffling of job duties to give them the time to learn. Various tech experts predict AI will allow some companies to slash tens of thousands of man hours per year, thereby allowing people to work on other more important duties.

For example: The McKinsey Global Institute predicts automation alone could replace 21% of hours worked by 2030. Add generative AI to the equation and instead we’re looking at close to 30% of Americans’ hours worked to be automated instead just seven years down the road.

For many CFOs, that’s music to the ears. Consider how the average accounts payable department spends 16 hours getting vendor invoices approved each month or how 38% of businesses blame manual A/P processes for invoice errors.