Fight is on for the rock stars of artificial intelligence

Governments, corporations and even technology vendors are all grappling with major opportunities and challenges emerging as artificial intelligence moves from the lab into the boardroom. With any game-changing innovation the biggest challenge is often the scarcity of talent, not least in the field of AI where many of the advances emanated from academia. Often pioneers of this latest wave of disruption are PhD students from top global universities who see the opportunity to take a theory from the classroom and create a product or solution for the world. AI and deep learning, automation, predictive analytics, quantum computing and nano technology have all in some form started life in a lab or classroom - not in a traditional software development environment. The net result is that the new'rock stars' (well-paid technical talent) as they are so commonly called in Silicon Valley, are the PhD Research Scientists who are even fewer in number today than their predecessor software engineers.