Prompt engineer is the new kid on the Gen AI block
After creating text, images and videos on demand, generative AI is now creating a new type of jobs: prompt engineers.
Prompt engineer is an industry term for coders adept in instructing AI models to generate the best results. They also train these models to address biases, inefficiencies and hallucinations. And technology services companies witnessing more applications and projects using AI are finding a growing need for such talent.
Nisheeth Srivastava, chief technology and information officer (CTIO) of India Industry Platform at Capgemini said, “New courses like prompt engineering are emerging on the horizon. This is very easy to come up with and learn. The ability to ask the right questions becomes a skill.”
New prompt engineers are offered average annual salary of ₹4 lakh, while those with a decade’s experience get ₹30 lakh, Teamlease data showed. Globally, prompt engineers were in demand through last year —a job posting by US firm Anthropic in May last year offered $335,000 (₹2.8 crore) per year.
Generative AI may create new business cases, translating into deals valued at above $1 million, which has not happened so far for most domestic IT services firms. The chief executives of India’s top four IT services firms corroborated this in their December quarter post-earnings press conferences. Going forward, all of them expect larger deals to materialize through FY25 and beyond.
So far, while India’s top IT services firms have spoken about hundreds of generative AI pilots of small ticket sizes through FY25 and FY26, these pilots could translate into significant business deals, and prompt engineers are expected to play strategically important roles in this progress.
However, these hirings are unlikely to be of major volume. Sheba K. Fernando, associate vice-president and global head of data science and AI at largecap IT services firm LTIMindtree said, “Most prompt engineer requirements would be based on business use cases of clients, and would not be an intrinsic need for IT services providers. This is because of the simplified nature of generative AI applications, which
make issuing queries a task that may not always need a specialized employee. As a result, this could lead to a limited-volume need for such engineers based on very specific client requirements, and most of them may be fulfilled by companies that provide the AI models themselves.”
Prompt engineers remain a small part of overall tech hiring, but they will be strategically important in helping companies attract bigger clients and complete projects more efficiently. Demand for these engineers comes at a time when IT services firms are looking at a mixed year for hiring. In the first three quarters of FY24, net headcount at India’s top four IT services firms dropped by nearly 50,000. Both tech graduates and mid-career professionals depend on the IT services industry for most opportunities.
“Prompt engineers are a fad, but will persist in the near term,” said Kashyap Kompella, founder and CEO of technology consultancy firm RPA2AI Research. “This is because of generative AI deals growing in volume and execution for IT services firms, which will lead to a burst in short-term prompt engineer hiring—as long as the evolution of large language models (LLMs) continues. As a result, the next couple of financial years may lead to momentary demand for prompt engiFY23, neers, who will subsequently train LLMs to generate prompts by themselves,” Kompella said.
Prompt engineers may be re-skilled in future, Kompella added. “Early-stage evaluations across most quarters have shown that AI models are better at generating the best prompts than human engineers themselves. In the long run, once models are even better-trained, companies would be able to automate prompt generation for most professional tasks,” he added.
Re-skilling prompt engineers may not be difficult, though. Krishna Vij, head of IT staffing and job services firm Teamlease Digital, said that skills of a prompt engineer include “foundational AI and machine learning (ML), proficiency in Python, and familiarity in data analysis”.
This early crop of prompt engineers is part of a holistic talent base that India Inc. hopes to create in the long run.