Employers will pay a hefty premium to financial experts who also know AI, new research shows

A new survey by Access Partnership and Amazon Web Services has revealed that, on average, employers are willing to pay employees in their finance departments who have AI skills 42% more than peers without such expertise.

Compared with other departments, employers also said they’re willing to pay an average of 47% more to IT workers with AI skills, 43% more to sales and marketing workers, 41% more to those in business operations, 37% more to those working in legal, regulatory, and compliance, and 35% more to employees in human resources.

Employers said AI could boost productivity by 47% if fully utilized, with employees putting that figure closer to 41%. This indicates that the wage premium is strongly correlated with gains in productivity, according to AWS and Access Partnership. The findings are based on a survey of 3,297 employees and 1,340 organizations in the U.S., across multiple industries.

“As customers increasingly adopt AI and machine learning (ML) technologies, the need for cloud expertise is on the rise,” Jenni Troutman, director of products and services at AWS Training and Certification, said in a statement. “Organizations and individuals who invest in skills training are better equipped to keep pace with innovation; generative AI is no different.” (AWS is offering more free AI skills training programs, Troutman added.)

For CFOs, there are big concerns about finding talent who can execute strategic technology objectives. Deloitte’s Q3 2023 CFO Signals survey found that 63% of finance chiefs said the greatest barriers to adopting and deploying generative AI are talent resources and capabilities.

Generative AI is “going to separate winners from losers; and it’s going to truly turbocharge the winners faster than you and I have been expecting,” Andrew McAfee, a principal research scientist at MIT, said during Fortune‘s CFO Collaborative event earlier this month, held in collaboration with Workday and Deloitte.

Another key finding of the AWS and Access Partnership survey is that more than 93% of employers and 86% of employees expect to use generative AI within the next five years. The tech, according to the respondents, will be used to increase innovation and creativity, automate repetitive tasks, and boost learning.

Upskilling in AI will be on many to-do lists in 2024.

Sheryl Estrada
sheryl.estrada@fortune.com

Leaderboard

Kris Corbett was named CFO at New Mountain Finance Corporation (Nasdaq: NMFC), the publicly traded credit BDC arm of New Mountain Capital, effective Nov. 27. Corbett joins New Mountain from Blackstone Credit, where he served as a SVP, controller and treasurer of both the Blackstone Private Credit Fund and the Blackstone Secured Lending Fund. Before that, he was a managing director at Perella Weinberg Partners. 

Anastasiya “Stasy” Pasterick was named CFO at Universal Hydrogen Co., effective Dec. 4. Pasterick comes to Universal Hydrogen after more than four years at Nikola Corp. (Nasdaq: NKLA), where she served most recently as CFO. Before Nikola, she held several financial leadership positions at various OEMs, including director of accounting operations at Erickson, Inc. and Corporate Controller at nLIGHT, Inc. 

Big deal

The Future of Generative AI: C-Suite Perspectives for 2024 and Beyond, is a new report released by Icertis, an AI-powered contract management platform. The findings are based on a survey of 500 senior executives at businesses across the U.S. and U.K. When it comes to deploying generative AI, 51% plan to engage with new vendors; 58% plan to leverage existing relationships; and 51% aim to utilize in-house IT resources. For those who use external vendors, the top two factors in selecting a provider are data security strategy and policies related to privacy and ethics. In third place was their cost, according to the report.

Another key finding of the report is executives see the IT, finance, and marketing departments as the top three areas for immediate savings with the use of generative AI. Nearly half of respondents believe AI will impact their bottom line in 2024, and an additional 36 % believe it will impact their bottom line in the next two to five years.

Going deeper

Women on the Front Line: Enabling Them to Thrive, Stay, and Perform, a new report released by Catalyst in partnership with Accenture, outlines the top actions that would improve women's working conditions and provides step-by-step guidance to get there. For example, creating and clarifying growth opportunities. Companies must clearly communicate well-structured opportunities for growth and advancement that are designed to meet the needs of women, according to the report.

Overheard

"I tell my clients that they would benefit from adopting a flexible approach to RTO mandates. A one-size-fits-all policy may not only lead to legal repercussions but also overlook the diverse needs of a modern workforce."

—Gleb Tsipursky, Ph.D., the CEO of the boutique future-of-work consultancy Disaster Avoidance Experts, writes in a Fortune opinion piece explaining how employers may be walking into a legal storm by enforcing rigid return-to-office (RTO) mandates.