AI engineers are deployed as consultants and are paid $ 900 per hour

AI engineers are paid for a premium to work as a consultant to help large companies to help out, adopt and integrate AI into business data – something that traditional consultants may not be able to do so.
Promptql, a business AI platform created by the San Francisco-based developer tools company, Hasura, distributes $ 900 wages per hour to its engineers responsible for building and deploying AI agents to analyze the company’s internal data using large-language models (LLMS).
The price reflects “intuition” and the technical skills necessary to follow the pace of rapid evolution technology, Tanmai Gopal, co -founder and CEO of promptql, said Fortune.
Gopal said that the company’s hourly wages for AI engineers as a consultant is “aligned with the rate in force that you would see for AI engineers”, but that “it seems that we should increase this price even more”, because customers do not postpone the price price sets.
“The types of MBA … are very strategic thinkers, and they are intelligent people, but they have no intuition for what AI can do,” said Gopal.
Gopal refused to disclose all the customers who used promptql to integrate AI into their business, but says that the list includes “the largest company of networking” as well as the best fast food companies, electronic commerce, grocery store and food delivery technologies, and “one of the largest B2B companies”.
Oana Iordăchescu, founder of Deep Tech Recruitment, a charming agency focused on AI, quantum and tech frontier talent, said Fortune Companies and startups are competing for senior IA engineers at “unprecedented rate” which leads to wage inflation.
Iordăchescu said that wages are at the price “well above even the four major advisory partners”, who often earn about $ 400 at $ 600 an hour.
“Traditional management consultants can design AI strategies, but most do not have practical technical expertise to debug models, build pipelines or integrate systems into an inherited infrastructure,” said Iordăchescu. “AI engineers working as a consultants fill this gap. They are not content to advise, they execute. ”
AI consultant Rob Howard said Fortune He was not surprised by “breathtaking figures” as a salary of $ 900 per hour for AI consulting works, because he saw a high price on projects that have an AI component while companies rush to adopt it in their business.
Howard, who is also the innovative CEO with AI, a program to teach people to become full AI consultants, said that some of his students sold AI training or two -day training camps that cost $ 400 or $ 500 per hour.
“The price for this is generally high on the whole market, because it is in demand and new and relatively rare to find, you know, qualified people to do so,” said Howard.
A recent report published by the Nanda of MIT initiative, revealed that, even if the generator is promising for businesses, 95% of initiatives aimed at generating rapid growth in income have failed. Aditya Chalcapally, the main author of the report and research contributor to the Nanda project at MIT, previously said Fortune The failures of the AI pilot program have not reached the quality of AI models, but the “learning gap” for tools and organizations.
“Some pilots of large companies and younger startups really excel with a generative AI,” said Chalapally Fortune Earlier this month. Startups led by children 19 or 20 years old, for example, “have seen revenues go from zero to $ 20 million in one year,” he said.
“It is because they choose a point of pain, execute well and combine intelligently with companies that use their tools,” he added.
Jim Johson, an AI consulting director at Ansvreer, said Fortune The salary of $ 900 per hour “is perfectly logical” when companies spent two years experimenting with AI and “having little to show for that”.
“Now the pressure is on the demonstration of real progress, and they discover that there is no easy button for corporate AI,” said Johnson. “This premium will not last forever, but for the moment, companies are essentially buying insurance against membership of this 95%failure statistics.”
Gopal said that the promptql business model so that IA engineers serve both as a consultants and deployed engineers (FDES) – Hybrid sales and engineering jobs responsible for integrating AI solutions – is what makes their employees so precious.
This new wave of AI engineers in engineers shakes up the council industry, Gopal said. But he considers his business as helping to move the expectations and culture of traditional consulting partnerships.
“The demand is there,” he said. “I think what makes it difficult is that managers, especially in some of the established companies … are somehow more used to the traditional style of consultants.”
Gopal said that the challenge for his business will be to “drive this leadership and education, and saying:” People, there is a new way of doing things “.
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