In Silicon Valley’s white-hot race for AI talent, companies are looking for two types of people: the experts and the learners.
The first group is made up of the world-renowned technical talent that can design chips, program large language models, and engineer sophisticated AI apps. The second group comprises the business leaders who prove to be the most adept at using the new technology.
This new class of executives will need to be “bilingual” in AI and their area of expertise, Google Cloud chief operating officer Francis deSouza said at the Fortune COO Summit on Monday.
“The marketing person should not only know marketing, but should now get very comfortable with AI tools and where they could go,” deSouza said. “And that’s not just in marketing, but finance, logistics, you know, sales. At some point, everybody in the org will want to be bilingual.”
Employers should undertake dedicated companywide efforts to teach employees these new AI skills, according to Microsoft Americas chief operating officer Tracy Galloway.
“Find the work elements you want to apply something against, put the [AI] agents in, and work with your customer support, your HR, so that they’re learning and training along the way,” Galloway said.
The benefits to those who pick up these skills would be significant: “The people who leverage this technology will be orders of magnitude more productive, more effective, and [will] do things that others can’t,” deSouza said.
Finding ‘very specialized’ AI experts
DeSouza is under no illusions about how difficult it is to find AI experts—the computer scientists who will build the technology. “That is a very specialized talent; that is very rare,” he said.
Google turns to academic institutions to recruit this talent, which is in short supply, deSouza added. He pointed to many of Google’s AI efforts, which include developing its Gemini model and designing proprietary chips, as key reasons people wanted to join the company: “Fortunately, we’re doing exciting work,” he said.
Since OpenAI’s ChatGPT-3.5 model catapulted AI into the public consciousness in November 2022, Silicon Valley’s top firms have been engaged in an all-out war for the world’s best AI researchers. More than two years on from that seminal moment, the push to recruit the best and brightest in the field hasn’t slowed.
Many tech giants have come up with unique solutions for how to assemble the superteams of the best AI executives and developers they covet. For example, in March 2024 Microsoft signed an unusual $650 million licensing deal with the startup Inflection AI, that would also allow it to hire its key personnel, including its founder Mustafa Suleyman. In August of last year Google put together its own unorthodox deal with the startup Character AI, which was founded by one of its former employees. The $2.7 billion agreement gives Google a nonexclusive license to Character AI’s tech and also allows it to hire some of the startup’s employees.