Top technology companies, including Accenture, IBM and the Tata Group, are among those hiring artificial intelligence specialists in the thousands as they integrate the sunrise technology with their core functions, creating demand for a new category of workers termed as prompt engineers, talent and recruitment firms told ET.
In the last six months alone, 18,000-22,000 new roles were created in the segment according to hiring firm TeamLease. Typically, college graduates with basic English language proficiency are bagging entry level jobs, while engineers with AI and machine learning certification can demand compensation of around Rs 20 lakh annually, recruiters said. At the entry level, prompt engineers could be paid around Rs 4 lakh per annum, they added.
"The demand for AI prompt engineers has gone up by 300% on a year-on-year basis. This comes on the back of rapid adoption of generative AI technologies such as ChatGPT, DALL-E, and other large language models (LLMs)," said Jaideep Kewalramani, COO at TeamLease Edtech.
"AI centric companies are also investing in integrating generative AI capabilities with their core business functions, thereby generating additional demand," he added.
India's most valued IT company Tata Consultancy Services said prompt engineering allows companies to curate AI responses, ensuring it aligns with business intents, while also reducing costs.
"... (it) enables interactions with LLMs to extract information, summarize texts, respond to questions, generate code, classify text " said Janardhan Santhanam, Vice President and Chief Learning Officer at TCS.
However, as GenAI applications gain scale, prompt engineers may not remain as a separate role, he cautioned. "Instead, all stakeholders in the GenAI application lifecycle will need to acquire prompt engineering skills to improve their outcomes."
Accenture and IBM did not reply to ET's queries on the matter.
ETtech In-Depth | The art and tech of business of prompts
Best outcomes, lowest cost
Prompt engineering is the process of structuring an instruction that can be interpreted and understood by a generative AI model. It is an interface between human intent and machine output, which requires special understanding of each AI model's architecture, training data, tokenization method and model parameters.
Among critical skills required for qualifying as prompt engineers are - proficiency in natural language processing and understanding of AI models like ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and DALL-E as well as strong analytical and problem-solving skills to create, test, and refine prompts. Additionally, familiarity with programming languages such as Python is often required.
"These skills are crucial for the entire lifecycle of AI model instruction-training, fine-tuning, testing, controlling hallucinations and inaccuracies, building safety guardrails, and finally deploying in production environment," said Paramdeep Singh, co-founder of GenAI solutions startup Shorthills AI.
He was quick to debunk assumptions that a prompt engineer's job is just about "writing some sentences, that's a misconception," he noted.
For instance, in testing, there is cost involved in every input and output of the model. A skilled prompt engineer will be able to derive the best outcomes at least cost rather than a hit-and-trial exercise. Similarly, writing and debugging software code with GenAI tools also needs expertise and knowledge of programming languages.
The cost-effectiveness perspective becomes even more crucial for large image models such as Midjourney, Dall-E which are expensive and need more computation.
"Prompt engineering is emerging to be a key differentiator skillset as the industry is progressing towards complex multimodalities across text, speech, image and video formats. In fact, we believe, very soon, there will be startups emerging to offer prompting-as-a-service," said Anushree Verma, director analyst, emerging technologies and trends, Gartner.
Rapid Growth
Industry experts note that growth of AI prompt engineering jobs in India has shown remarkable increase over the past year,
Sekhar Garisa, CEO, foundit, a talent platform pegs average prompt engineer salaries in India to range between Rs 8 lakh to Rs 13 lakh annually. Overall, the company expects the job market for generative AI in India to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 20% over the next decade.
However, the opportunities are still scarce compared to the US where prompt engineering is among the top sought after skills, experts said.
"In the US, starting salaries can range from $120,000 to $350,000 per year," said Kewalramani. "The US market leads in terms of early adoption and advanced applications of generative AI, creating a larger demand for skilled prompt engineers," he said.
AI-powered process automation startup E42.ai said, as the model matures, prompt engineers play an important role in integrating it into applications and designing user-friendly interfaces.
For instance, the startup built a tool capable of generating SWOT reports. "By crafting precise prompts, engineers enabled the AI model to accurately extract relevant information from vast datasets," said Sanjeev Menon, Co-Founder, E42.
