Tech Workers Restructure to Prepare for AI Boom

To make this happen, employees are trying to close the gap between what they know and what they need to know, adding skills and knowledge to adapt to this groundbreaking technology. Meanwhile, technology companies are reinventing themselves as AI companies and retooling their employees to be more AI-savvy.

“I've been working on a resume tailored to AI for the last couple of months,” said Asif Dhanani, 31, of Irvine, California, who was laid off from his job as a technical product manager at Amazon in March.

Dhanani has interviewed multiple times for AI product manager roles but hasn't received any offers. He has worked with large-scale language models before, but not since 2016. Technology has changed a lot since then. And he doesn't seem to fully understand what companies are looking for. Plus, two hiring managers have told him he's sifting through hundreds of applicants.

His next step is a two-week, online AI bootcamp run by Deep Atlas, costing $6,800. “For me, skill building is a worthwhile investment,” he says, but it won’t help him get a job.

The tech labor market is in an imbalance. A specific type of top AI talent is needed: people with technical knowledge and experience in large-scale language models (LLMs) that give chatbots content generation capabilities. Companies are looking for candidates with those skills, but there aren't enough qualified workers.

And then there are the rest of us. Thousands of people have been laid off over the past few years, and many of those who remain employed are dealing with new management styles, reorganizations, and minor layoffs as more resources are shifted to AI. These workers are now taking AI courses, adding buzzwords to their resumes, and competing in an increasingly competitive field.

Tony Phillips, co-founder of Deep Atlas Bootcamps, said he's noticed a much greater level of urgency that tech workers feel about the need to upskill. Deep Atlas recently added five more slots for its summer AI bootcamp.

“People are starting to see the signs that their jobs might actually become obsolete,” he says. “They probably won't be replaced by AI, but they'll be replaced by people who know AI and can do their jobs.”

According to Microsoft and LinkedIn's 2024 Work Trends Index, as of December, the number of LinkedIn members adding skills such as Copilot and ChatGPT to their profiles grew 142 times year over year. The study also found that job posts on LinkedIn that mention AI received 17% more applications than non-AI roles.

One sales manager with more than 10 years of experience said his SaaS company had been through a reorganization, tougher performance management reviews, and some small layoffs. He applied to jobs at OpenAI and Anthropic earlier this year but didn't hear back from either. He believes he needed AI-specific sales experience to join the company.

Tech companies are investing heavily in AI, but they aren't experiencing the hiring frenzy of a few years ago: New tech job openings have fallen to an average of 180,000 per month in April, down from about 308,000 in 2019, according to tech trade group CompTIA.

While AI and machine learning jobs are making up a growing share of overall tech job openings in the U.S., they still don't make up a large portion of the overall tech job market. According to data from labor market analytics firm Lightcast, AI and machine learning job listings grew from 9.5% of tech jobs in January 2023 to 11.5% in April 2024. But this increase is coming amid an overall slump in demand for tech jobs, said Art Theil, CEO of DHI Group, the parent company of tech job marketplace Dice.

According to Zeile, many of the companies hiring for AI or AI-related roles are consulting firms.

“That means big companies are hiring business consultants to start building pilots and prototypes,” he says.

Many tech workers specifically want to work for companies that are solving AI problems, said Nancy Hsu, founder of Moonhub, a recruiting firm that recruits for artificial intelligence companies. They may be at desirable tech companies, but “they're leaving those companies because they want to go to an AI company,” she said.

Applicants shouldn't be too discouraged by a lack of experience, Xu said: Many companies are looking for people to build applications on top of large language models, which requires software engineering skills but not AI-specific experience.

OpenAI is willing to take a chance on people new to the field, says Elena Chatziathanasiadou, who runs the ChatGPT maker's six-month training program. More important than prior experience in AI is a willingness to learn and a commitment to the company's mission, Chatziathanasiadou says. The program has accepted college dropouts, neuroscientists and a Juilliard School graduate who worked on an AI-based music research project.

“We're big on helping people understand the field,” Chatziathanassiadou says.

Anna X. Wang, head of AI at education technology company Multiverse, is building a machine learning engineering team and has three key criteria: coding skills, soft skills like learning agility and the ability to collaborate across disciplines, and a foundational knowledge of AI theory, which can be learned by self-study or through online courses.

Finding the first two is hard enough, she says, but when you add in the third requirement of really understanding which AI tools should be used to solve which problems — “not just messing around with ChatGPT” — the field becomes extremely narrow.

Leading technology companies are working to improve AI skills for their entire workforce. Salesforce's training platform, Trailhead, currently offers 43 AI-related courses, ranging from the basics to the ethical use of AI. More than 60,000 Salesforce employees have taken at least one AI course.

“We believe everyone should have the tools they need to reskill and succeed in this new world,” says Jayesh Govindarajan, senior vice president of Salesforce AI.

Juliet Kelso, a consultant who has worked on projects identifying AI opportunities at Meta and Google, moved into the field about a year and a half ago, before the competition intensified. She took the initiative to learn about AI.

“I conducted research projects to identify the best AI tools depending on company size, business use case, and whether clients wanted to prioritize the most innovative AI products and platforms,” she says.

Ms. Kelso went on to found the Oasis Collective, a San Francisco group that hosts networking and educational events for women in AI. She said she has seen multiple founders teach themselves how to build AI products to change the focus of their startups.

“There's a hierarchy of coolness for AI founders,” she says. “The lowest level of coolness is when you're running a company and you're literally integrating and using AI tools into your product and calling yourself an AI company.”

Write to Katherine Bindley at katie.bindley@wsj.com.