AI ‘title inflation’ to improve pay will be short lived as companies wise up, say Gartner experts

So-called title inflation for AI’s Johnny-come-latelies won’t last and while many companies have put aside budget, few have AI products up and running, a summit has heard.

Analysts Frank Buytendijk, Tong Zhang and Erick Brethenoux.

Companies which have laid off workers or refuse to fill openings in the hope that artificial intelligence will be able to take the roles will soon find themselves in a difficult position or potentially even worse off.

That’s the view from experts at research and advisory firm Gartner, who said that less than 50 per cent of companies were actually reaping the benefit of using AI.

Analyst Frank Buytendijk told Gartner’s Data & Analytics Summit in Sydney that companies which acted hastily over hiring decisions as AI takes off would be hampered.

“Over the next two years we’re not going to see a lot of effects from AI because it takes a lot of time to replace a person with a machine in their job,” he said. “Moreover, only 50 per cent of organisations get the most out of AI at this moment anyway.”

Mr Buytendijk spoke alongside Gartner analysts Erick Brethenoux and Tong Zhang on the company’s view of AI and how it would disrupt business over the next two years.

In June, this newspaper reported that 73 per cent of business leaders said they felt pressured into adopting AI and about 72 per cent believed they didn’t have adequate skills to use the technology.

Many companies were feeling pressure after OpenAI made ChatGPT available publicly and consumer expectations had risen, Mr Buytendijk said.

“Customer service chatbots all of a sudden were considered wildly inadequate. That’s the difference between February and August. There is now pressure that you can’t ignore,” he said.

Gartner had seen a number of companies in the “exploration” phase with generative AI but many were yet to implement the technology, Mr Brethenoux said.

“In terms of the use cases, what we see today is a lot more exploration than operationalisation,” he said.

Many companies were still considering the risks associated with the adoption of generative AI and large language models, and were planning to adopt governance strategies before the technology was implemented.

Some workers were quick to update their resumes in the wake of AI, and many were now calling themselves AI experts.

While it’s possible there would be some benefits in remuneration, those spikes would be short lived, Mr Buytendijk said.

“We saw the same pattern with data scientists. All of a sudden every business analyst was calling themselves a data scientist and went up one salary layer all of a sudden,” he said.

Mr Buytendijk said that while title inflation – the practice of changing one’s job title to make it sound more important – would arrive, it wouldn’t last long.

“Soon everyone will call themselves a prompt engineer … and ask for more money, but before long organisations will see that it’s actually not worth it,” he said.

Originally published as AI ‘title inflation’ to improve pay will be short lived as companies wise up, say Gartner experts