India among top 5 in AI skills, shows study

Mumbai: The US, China, India, Israel, and Germany rank as the countries with the highest penetration of artificial intelligence (AI) skills among their workforce, LinkedIn said.

As per the job search engine, AI skills are among the fastest-growing skills on the platform, which saw a 190 per cent jump from 2015 to 2017.

“Our findings suggest that while changes driven by AI technologies may still be in their infancy, we are already seeing their impact across the global labour market,” it said.

AI skills refers to the skills needed to create artificial intelligence technologies, which include expertise in areas like neural networks, deep learning, and machine learning, as well as actual “tools” such as Weka and Scikit-Learn.

LinkedIn data shows that all types of technical AI skills are growing at a rapid pace around the world.

The industries with the most AI skills present in their workforce are also the industries that are changing the fastest.

In some cases, it said changes are driven by the nature of jobs or tasks changing, such as, say, an accountant focusing more on human-centric customer service tasks and less on routine tasks which have been automated — or a marketing specialist focusing on search engine optimisation (SEO) to make their company’s blog content easier to discover via a Google search.

Some of the jobs that have grown over the past five years include software engineer, marketing specialist, human resource specialist, marketing manager, recruiter, real estate agent, data analyst, HR consultant, account manager and user experience designer. On the other hand, jobs that have declined includes administrative assistant, salesperson, customer service representative, journalist, editor, accountant, food and beverage servers, mechanical technician, manager of retail and electrical technician.

While the software industry does continue to stand out as the top field for professionals with AI skills, growth is also strong in sectors like education and academia, hardware and networking, finance, manufacturing, consumer goods, healthcare, corporate services, entertainment and media & communication.