Fierce AI Talent War Shifts to India With Salaries Being Doubled
- Top recruits are getting their comp doubled at new companies
- One worker was offered a BMW motorcycle as a sign-on bonus
Aditya Chopra isn’t looking for a new job, but recruiters keep calling him anyway. The 36-year-old data-science specialist works in artificial intelligence, perhaps the most coveted experience on the planet after OpenAI demonstrated the breakthroughs of ChatGPT. Chopra, who works outside of New Delhi, sees friends in the field get pay hikes of 35% to 50% each time they switch jobs. “There’s a real shortage of data and AI talent,” he said.
An AI hiring frenzy is ricocheting around the world, from Silicon Valley to Europe, Asia and beyond. While tech giants like Google and Baidu Inc. dangle top-notch packages for the engineers to build their own AI engines, companies in almost every other field — from health care and finance to entertainment — are staffing up too, to avoid getting blindsided by shifts in their industries.