The majority of business leaders globally, 81%, believe AI and other tech disruptions will force organizations to radically rethink skills and human resources across large areas of their workforce, according to a survey conducted by the World Employment Confederation.
The survey polled hundreds of senior executives from Fortune 2000 companies.
Meanwhile, 78% of those same executives are concerned that they cannot train employees fast enough to keep pace with technology developments in the next three years. The WEC stated that one of the solutions to bridging unexpected resourcing gaps is an agile workforce.
Most senior executives, 92%, reported they’ll need a more flexible workforce in the next two years. Employing agency workers becomes increasingly attractive not just as an extra pair of hands but also as a way to access hard-to-find digital skills and access higher-caliber candidates, the WEC stated.
At the same time, 79% of senior executives also highlight that employing agency workers with knowledge of a new technology is an effective way to spread understanding to permanent employees. Most (88%) plan to increase their use of agency workers in response to market dynamics.
“AI has made agility non-negotiable, and the HR services industry is crucial in helping to fill the labor and skills gaps brought on by digitalization,” said WEC Managing Director Denis Pennel.
Other key findings from the research found that 80% of senior executives say talent planning has never been more difficult than it is today; 82% say that the approaches used to find and retain talent in the past are no longer fit for purpose; and 83% say that employees now value flexibility around where and when they work as much as other factors such as compensation.
Amazon completed its largest investment in an outside company ever, as it steps up its efforts in the AI race to compete with rivals including Microsoft.
The tech giant made an additional $2.75 billion investment in AI startup Anthropic, it said Wednesday, adding to the initial $1.25 billion it piled into the company in September.
“We have a notable history with Anthropic, together helping organizations of all sizes around the world to deploy advanced generative artificial intelligence applications across their organizations,” Swami Sivasubramanian, vice president of data and AI at Amazon Web Services (AWS), said in a statement. “Generative AI is poised to be the most transformational technology of our time, and we believe our strategic collaboration with Anthropic will further improve our customers’ experiences, and look forward to what’s next.”
Anthropic uses AWS as its primary cloud provider for AI safety research and model development. Amazon has also said Anthropic will use AWS’s AI chips, Trainium and Inferentia, “to build, train, and deploy its future models.” Anthropic also has a long-term commitment to give AWS customers access to its future models through Amazon Bedrock, its service that allows companies like Delta Air Lines and Pfizer build their generative AI products, Amazon said.
Earlier this month, Anthropic announced its new family of AI models, Claude 3, which is accessible on Amazon Bedrock. Claude 3 includes Opus, branded as its “most intelligent model,” which Anthropic said outperformed Microsoft-backed OpenAI’s GPT-4 in a range of tasks. In a series of evaluations of industry benchmarks for AI models, including undergraduate- and graduate-level reasoning and common knowledge, Opus outperformed the most advanced version of both ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini.
Amazon will keep a minority ownership position in Anthropic, it said.
### Talent Shortage and Intense Recruitment in the Tech Industry
#### Industry Shifts and Recruitment Battles
1. **Industry Layoffs and Talent Scarcity**: Despite widespread layoffs in the tech industry, a specific sector is facing challenges in finding suitable talent, sparking fierce competition for skilled professionals. The scarcity of qualified candidates has led to a surge in offers, with reports of salaries reaching up to $1 million.
2. **Generous Compensation and Incentives**: Companies, including both small startups and industry giants like OpenAI and Meta, are offering substantial compensation packages and additional perks. These incentives include accelerated stock-vesting schedules and efforts to attract entire teams from rival companies.
3. **Shift in Talent Priorities**: Naveen Rao, head of Generative AI at Databricks, noted a significant shift in the sought-after skills, highlighting the imbalance between the surplus of certain talents and the scarcity of others.
#### Compensation and Offer Details
4. **OpenAI's Median Salary**: OpenAI reportedly offered a median salary, including bonuses and equity, of $925,000, underscoring the extraordinary compensation being offered in this competitive talent landscape.
5. **Meta's Compensation Statistics**: Meta, formerly known as Facebook, disclosed that the median compensation, encompassing bonuses and equity, for its 344 machine learning and AI engineers, was approximately $400,000, as reported to Levels.fyi.
6. **Recruitment Tactics**: Meta's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, has gone to the extent of personally reaching out to AI researchers at Google's DeepMind in a bid to entice them to join Meta. The company has also adjusted its hiring policies, reportedly offering roles without conventional interviews and reconsidering its stance on offering higher salaries to candidates with competitive job offers.
#### Industry Dynamics and Business Adjustments
7. **Industry-Wide Layoffs and AI Focus**: Major tech giants like Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, and Meta have announced layoffs, partly in an effort to realign their focus on AI development. This strategic shift is influenced by the business's response to over-hiring during a significant market boom in 2021, alongside the subsequent need for restructuring due to economic conditions.
8. **Business Transformation and Talent Requirements**: Andrew Challenger, an expert in labor and workplace dynamics, emphasized the aggressive cost-cutting measures and the embrace of technological innovations, both of which are reshaping the staffing needs of businesses in the current landscape.
Through the intense competition for talent and the pronounced impacts on industry dynamics, the tech sector presents an intriguing study of how talent scarcity has prompted organizations to reassess their recruitment strategies and reconsider their compensation norms, culminating in a highly competitive and fluid talent market.