- Companies across industries are hiring talent to help them develop and use generative AI.
- The law firm Husch Blackwell and insurer Travelers are among those seeking AI skills.
- Listings for such roles tend to offer above $100,000 in base salary and go as high as $300,000.
AI developers, engineers, and consultants are seeing lots of new job opportunities with companies far outside the traditional tech world looking to put generative artificial intelligence to work.
Listings at non-tech firms showed a wide range of salaries — often exceeding well over $100,000 in base pay. One for a machine learning researcher role at the trading firm Jane Street indicated a salary range of $250,000 to $300,000. A representative for Jane Street declined to comment.
Companies are on the hunt for candidates whose knowledge of AI can help them use their in-house data more extensively — for instance, by making better predictions and decisions, said Aaron Sines, a director at the Austin-based tech recruiting company Razoroo. One agriculture client is looking to potentially use AI to help estimate crop yields, he said.
"The demand for professionals with knowledge in AI research, machine learning, deep learning — it truly outpaces the available supply of candidates," Sines said.
That means the salaries companies are offering to lure people with this type of experience can quickly rise beyond six figures: The base salary ranges for AI researcher roles, even at non-tech companies, can range from $150,000 to $250,000, Sines said.
"There's certainly a scarcity, I think, and our clients are acutely aware of that, which inherently is driving upward pressure on compensation." he said.
The insurance company Travelers had listed a data engineer role that sought AI expertise, with a potential base pay of $113,900 to $188,000. The company's CEO Alan Schnitzer affirmed the company's push into AI on an earnings call this month, saying that "we have a very significant number of our employees engaged on the objective of making sure that we're leading when it comes to AI."
The exercise bike company Peloton Interactive posted a role for a machine learning engineer, with a salary range of $171,600 to $223,000 listed on LinkedIn. The yoga apparel company Alo listed a senior data engineer role that involves working on AI issues, that would offer base pay between $160,000 to $220,000, according to the listing.
And AI-related roles don't always require engineering or coding skills.
The law firm Husch Blackwell is hiring an "AI solutions strategist" who would help its lawyers learn to efficiently use AI tools like Casetext's CoCounsel, which uses OpenAI's GPT-4 model. (That's the same model that, in a test, passed the bar exam for lawyers.)
CoCounsel is meant to help lawyers speed up tasks like looking over contract terms, and gathering material for legal filings, according to Casetext's website.
"Investing in AI talent and resources ensures they can take advantage of the latest advances in legal technology," Valerie McConnell, a VP of customer success at Casetext, told Insider in a statement, referring to its law firm clients. "CoCounsel allows law firms to deliver better results for their clients, but the technology is only enhanced by the user being well-educated on the product and its abilities."
For its AI role, Husch Blackwell has looked for trained lawyers who understand AI and large language models, and ideally also have some business consulting experience, said Blake Rooney, chief information officer at Husch Blackwell.
A listing for the role on LinkedIn provides multiple salary ranges depending on the location of candidates, going up to $164,000 for those in New York state. Employees can work at one of the firm's offices or remotely, or have a hybrid arrangement, according to the firm. It's also a bonus-eligible role, the firm said.
The position has already drawn "several hundred" responses, and the company is planning to finalize a hire soon, Rooney said. The firm also plans on bringing on more such AI strategists if the hire is successful, he said.
The ideal candidate should have "the ability to understand a business problem or a technical problem and help engineer a solution," Rooney said.
It's a staffing approach that also shows a strategy where non-tech companies like Husch Blackwell are doing two things to boost their use of AI — licensing commercially available AI technology like CoCounsel, and also trying to develop their own proprietary tools in some cases.
The law firm already built a data science team over the past three years, and automated some routine tasks. For instance, the firm leaned on OpenAI's technology to help speed up writing the bios of some 112 summer interns it brought on this year.
The task, which was traditionally done by members of its client development team, was now done by an AI-driven automation process where interns would simply answer a set of questions, and their responses would help generate their bios, Rooney said.
For professional services firms, it's also about keeping up with clients who are themselves embracing AI.
"So we want to we want to be on the forefront of using the technology," Rooney said.