Demand for prompt engineers stalling as companies seek broader skill sets
generative AI came into the spotlight – is stabilising. Staffing experts are noticing a plateauing in the need for specialist prompt engineers, with businesses seeking AI engineers with a broader skill set as techniques like retrieval augment generation or grounding, fine-tuning, and continual pre-training are seeing increasing innovation and relevance, and tools to automate prompt optimisation are emerging.
Prompt engineers are people who optimise prompts to ensure accurate and desirable output from Gen AI models.
“Prompt engineering and demand for prompt engineers is by scope and nature highly seasonal and short-termed,” said Krishna Gautam, business head — direct hiring — at specialist staffing firm Xpheno. “The role's eventual output is to enhance the intuitive capabilities of the AI, including the ability to autonomously frame, test and calibrate prompts. Given this specific nature of the stack, prompt engineering will eventually phase out itself from being a significant part of the AI capacity matrix of enterprises.”
The industry is seeing flattish demand lines for prompt engineering in between major build phases of AI tools, Gautam noted. Globally, active demand was nearly flat for the past three quarters and is now seeing a comparative rise.
“We are seeing that clients are asking more for holistic gen AI engineers having experience in other gen AI related areas apart from prompt engineering,” said Aniruddha Chakrabarti, partner, AI and cloud, Grant Thornton Bharat.
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