How Startups Are Grappling With the Artificial Intelligence Talent Hiring Frenzy

When Devaki Raj, the founder of the Mountain View-based deep learning startup CrowdAI, and Inc. 30 under 30 alum, learned that an artificial intelligence engineer she was trying to recruit was in the hospital, she didn't think twice about what she did next: Raj showed up at the hospital with flowers and balloons. She wanted to make sure the candidate got the message that her startup would be a very different atmosphere than what he'd get at a larger company. There's a talent war brewing between startups and big companies as both scramble to find top-notch artificial intelligence experts in a relatively small labor pool. "There's just not enough talent out there," Raj says. The number of experts in this field is not clear--Montreal startup Element A.I., which helps businesses build machine learning teams, estimates that there are some 20,000 PhD-level scientists around the world capable of building A.I. systems.