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.
“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.”
“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.
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.
