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As organizations hunt down AI talent for senior-level roles, many are overlooking the most basic skill they can teach current employees: feeding AI prompts. And it’s a skill that doesn’t require a STEM degree and years in a high-tech role.
“[Generative AI is] not really generative, it’s machine translation. That’s why the quality of the prompt is so important,” Sachin Dev Duggal, founder and chief wizard at Builder.AI, said during a panel at the Fortune Global Forum conference in Abu Dhabi on Wednesday. “It’s the quality of the prompt. It’s how you put it together. We’re very, very early. We seem to have a lot of hysteria around [believing] everything is generated, but really a lot of things are just regression, statistics, and not a lot more.”
Dev Duggal believes there are three talent “swimlanes” within AI:
1. The experts who can build the AI tools.
2. Those who can integrate AI into backend systems.
3. Front-end users who are masters at prompt engineering.
“That’s no longer training for AI. That’s training for prompting,” Dev Duggal said of front-end users. Focusing on this third swimlane allows companies to tap workers who didn’t pursue STEM fields.
“We meet with governments around the world, and they’re already [realizing] STEM is not going to work after a decade,” Dev Duggal said. “It’s going to be about art and literature and everything else because it stems the prompting and how you think about the future.”
Northwestern Kellogg School of Management Dean Francesca Cornelli said the university is working with several companies and helping them test their AI projects. She believes the academic environment acts as a “sandbox” where teams can address issues like poor data or ethical concerns without real-world consequences. But she also believes such experimentation should be practiced outside the academic world as well.
“Soon, we’ll have a lot of business leaders that say, ‘This is not keeping up with the promises.’ Well, it depends on the data or the question you ask,” says Cornelli. “The preparation is to a certain extent theoretical, but a lot is experiential. Try to get the feedback. What did you get wrong? What did you miss? That is something that I think will be essential; otherwise, there’ll be too many problems generated in business later.”
Roles that may be best suited for prompt engineering could also be the ones likely to be most impacted by generative AI.
“Those people that might be affected by [AI’s] productivity in one place…maybe it’s an opportunity for them to become the best prompt engineer,” says Chiara Marcati, a partner at McKinsey. “Maybe they were the [executive assistants], and now that EAs have been somewhat automated with Gen AI, they become the best prompter.”
Read more coverage from the Fortune Global Forum here.
Paige McGlauflin
paige.mcglauflin@fortune.com
@paidion
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