Are you thinking about investing in artificial intelligence development at your company? If so, now is the time to actually run your project.
Consider these:
- According to Gartner's 2019 survey, 37% of organizations have already introduced AI in some form. That's a 270% growth over the last four years!
- AI can be used in virtually every industry. According to the same Gartner’s survey, 52% of telcos use chatbots and 38% of healthcare providers make use of diagnostics assigned by algorithms
- As research by MMC Ventures suggests, “AI may be the fastest paradigm shift in technology history.” Demand for AI experts has doubled in the 24 months leading to the publication of this research.
It’s also getting increasingly more difficult to find suitable AI talents in the marketplace. Demand is simply too high. And because there are so many uses of AI in business, AI developers and other AI experts are often knowledgeable only in some specific part of the huge artificial intelligence industry. In other words, there are no generalists, but only people with a specified area of expertise.
All this can make the hiring process tricky. You might ask yourself: which AI developer should I choose? Can I trust this specific AI expert to handle my project?
To help you answer these questions, we’ve prepared our specialist guide on how to hire best AI developers and other top AI experts. Read along!
What is the role of an AI developer in a project?
The role of an AI expert is always to work on the most practical part of developing AI: coding it according to present requirements, implementing additional functionalities, testing and maintaining the software, etc. To achieve the planned results, an AI engineer must collaborate closely not only with other developers working on the project, but also with the data people at the company.
AI developers are usually the main elements of technical teams only if the company delivers AI solutions as a service directly to its clients. In other organizations, ones that use AI as part of bigger projects, AI experts usually focus on the specific algorithms to be implemented. This means that coding of the rest of the product (a website, a mobile app, desktop software, or any other kind of IT product) is left to other developers.
However, what you should remember, is that an AI developer is by no means supposed to work on project management or any similar processes. Project Manager, Product Owner, Scrum Masters, etc. — they should all be included in the process of AI software development, just like it happens on any other occasion. This is done to make sure the AI engineer can focus on coding and other technical parts of their role, and the final product can be delivered on time.
What skills do best AI developers have?
When thinking about the skills a good AI developer should have, once again you will need to think about what exactly are you planning to achieve with your project. Of course, there are some general skills that every AI expert should possess but additional ones might be required to meet your specific needs. We dive into both of these skill set categories below.
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Theoretical knowledge about artificial intelligence
When talking about a developer, you would normally mention first the need of knowing specific programming languages. But in the case of AI developers, theoretical knowledge about complicated AI-related concepts is also a must. We explain this further in the next section of this piece, Education.
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Programming languages
These also must be finally mentioned. Once again, AI developers are quite unique, and this time it’s because they focus on having more generalistic knowledge of a few different programming languages, instead of focusing on only one of them. Each, however, is used for slightly different purposes.
For example:
- C++ is great for robotics, speech recognition, autonomous vehicles, video games, and AI-powered search engines. In other words, the most complicated types of projects. It takes a while to get the best out of C++, though, so don’t expect rapid delivery of a project based on this language.
- Java is perfect when handling larger/scalable projects.
- Python, probably the most popular programming language among AI developers, is ideal to quickly build machine learning models and analyze data. It isn’t that suitable for huge commercial projects, though.
- JavaScripts might not be a typical first-choice programming language for AI experts, but there are some libraries that support machine learning and deep learning, making it useful if small AI for a website is needed.
- R is great for data analysis and is often used in academia and by statisticians.
- Other popular choices of AI programming language are Lisp, Prolog, Matlab, and Haskell.
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Libraries and frameworks
Programming languages and their dedicated libraries and frameworks are truly inseparable. Once again, depending on your project, you will be looking for a person with experience in different libs/frameworks. Here are some examples, based on Python:
- TensorFlow - the most popular AI library for Python, used for image and text recognition, language processing, and more.
- NumPy - used especially for complicated mathematical calculations.
- Caffe - used for deep learning.
- Orange3 - used for data mining and data visualization.
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Experience in operations on data
This includes data mining, data analysis, data visualization, machine learning, deep learning, and more. Without a decent amount of data, no AI can learn new things, meaning being able to handle these is important for every AI developer.
What educational background should an AI expert have?
Unlike it’s the case with some other software development specialties, self-learning how to work with AI is really difficult and often doesn’t bring results as good as graduating in one of the relevant disciplines. This is because working with complicated AI software requires both theoretical knowledge of complex ideas (including high-level mathematics), as well as a long practice done alongside the theory.
The best AI developers and other top AI experts are usually graduates of computer science, maths, statistics, or some kind of engineering. And we are talking here about people with master’s or even PhD.
The route to becoming an AI expert is usually filled with taking both theoretical and practical courses on:
- Various levels of maths, including probability, statistics, algebra, calculus, logic, and algorithms.
- Probabilistic graphical models, including neural and Bayesian networks.
- Physics, engineering, robotics.
- Cognitive science.
- Computer science, programming languages, coding.
- Data analytics, database management.
Soft skills of top AI experts
Besides the technical knowledge, be it of the programming languages used for AI software development or complex math algorithms, a set of important soft skills should also be considered when hiring AI engineers. Some of the ones especially worth mentioning are:
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Attention to details
AI is supposed to eliminate potential human errors, so it would be a real shame if the software built fails because of the developer’s oversight! Make sure the AI engineer you hire always triple-checks every piece of the puzzle and understands the importance of small details.
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Innate curiosity
Most influential developments are always done by people who are curious enough to try new things. Without curiosity, there is no innovation.
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Always up-to-date
In such a fast-paced and constantly changing area as AI software development, regularly following news and trends is crucial to being ahead of the competition.
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Patience
AI software development is still a relatively new thing which means there are a lot of unanswered questions and unsolved issues. It may sometimes take months before the best solution of a problem is found, which means only patient people should try to grasp AI engineering.
How to find the best AI developers for your project?
Because the spectrum of AI skills and specialties is so vast, when planning to hire AI developer, you should focus on finding a person who truly fits your project and company. Engineers who have already worked in your industry will probably have a better understanding of what you might be expecting.
Think also of what exactly your product needs in terms of AI.
Do you want to have speech recognition introduced? Look for someone that has already worked with this kind of AI software, potentially even an AI expert with a linguistic background.
Or maybe you need an AI-powered customer service chatbot? Then find an AI expert who has already developed one in the past!
If you want to significantly speed up the process of hiring an AI expert, you can also reach out to our team at Ideamotive. After the initial consultation, we will be able to present you a carefully reviewed list of candidates perfectly matching your requirements.
Some great interview questions for hiring AI experts
Getting ready for a technical interview with your top candidates? Here are some interview questions worth asking:
- In your own words, what is SGD?
- Why do we call naïve Bayes “naïve”?
- What is 1x1 convolution? What is it used for?
- What would be your approach to grouping documents into semantic groups according to their content?
- What are some regularization techniques in Deep Learning?
- How would you approach building an Amazon-like ecommerce recommendations system? (“People who bought this item, bought also…”)
- What's the connection between Gaussian Mixture Models and k-means?
How to develop successful AI software?
AI engineers are surely the core element of the AI development process — without their work, the solution planned would be just a theoretical concept, not an actual product. However, most AI projects also require other people to be involved in them, such as product owners or IT project managers. Other people working with data, such as data engineers who can establish a secure data pipeline, are also necessary.
To get your expert AI team assembled quickly and efficiently, contact us at Ideamotive. We operate an industry-leading network of top IT talents from all over the globe, always looking for new challenges. If you wish to onboard them and start creating a truly great product, contact us today and we’ll get you connected with the exact people you need — ones with experience in your industry and the type of AI solution you are developing.
