The professionals with the best skills are those who can negotiate the highest salary – and few skills have become as relevant and sought-after in 2024 like those that involve Artificial Intelligence (AI).
Mind you, we’re not talking about AI engineering itself, or about similar technical roles. Those are surging in popularity as well, naturally, yet these technologies have become so prominent and widespread that they are now an important element in the CVs of an exceptionally wide array of professionals – including many that are not tech-based at all.
In fact, studies by PwC as well as by AWS / Access Partnership are finding that AI skills can significantly boost your salary, by as much as 25%.
In this article, we will look at 10 jobs in which mastering AI skills will make you a more attractive candidate – and therefore someone perfectly placed to negotiate a higher salary!
1. Marketing Managers
Used in everything from content creation to analytics, AI skills are becoming increasingly indispensable for marketers of all stripes.
For marketing managers in particular, then, an advanced understanding of how AI can be used to create content, analyse consumer behaviour, predict trends, and personalise campaigns at scale can lead to a tremendous boost in their team’s productivity.
A marketing manager needs to have an overview of everything going on in their department, and AI will allow them to expand their competences in most if not all of the projects they choose to work on.
2. Financial Analysts
A financial analyst is expected to provide insight and timely advice on investments of all types. They do this by combining their expertise and intuition with the large amounts of economic data available to them.
AI offers cutting-edge tools to analyse data efficiently and at exponentially higher speeds, making it invaluable to analysts in this field.
As well, while it would be an exaggeration to say that AI is free of human bias (unfortunately, prejudice often tends to get accidentally encoded into its algorithms), it does avoid at least some of the pitfalls that come with an individual’s personal judgment. A financial analyst who can master these tools is therefore not just ahead of the competition, but in a sense, even ahead of themselves!
3. Human Resources Professionals
In spite of the industry’s name, in the near future Human Resources will no longer be a domain exclusive to humans. In fact, HR work involves very many tasks in which AI skills can make a significant difference.
These tasks include automating administrative chores, enhancing recruitment processes through predictive analytics, and improving employee engagement through personalised development plans. More options to integrate AI into the HR world will no doubt emerge as these technologies continue to develop.
4. Healthcare Administrators
It’s no secret that the world of healthcare is being completely revolutionised by the advent of AI technologies. The biggest changes are happening in fields pretty far removed from the average person, such as medical research and advanced surgery.
Even for regular healthcare administrators, however, the benefits of acquiring AI skills are undeniable. AI can improve patient care through predictive analytics, streamline administrative tasks, and assist in managing patient records. Understanding AI applications in healthcare can lead to better operational efficiency, and of course to the most important thing – better outcomes for the patients.
5. Retail Managers
Retail managers will find great value in AI for two purposes in particular: driving sales and improving customer satisfaction.
Under the umbrella of those two purposes, there are many specific tasks that retail managers can put AI to work on: personalising shopping experiences, optimising supply chains, and enhancing inventory management are but the most obvious examples.
6. Public Relations Specialists
Public relations specialists very much need their human sensibility to be effective, so it is highly unlikely that AI will ever replace them.
That being said, a PR Specialist with AI skills will be able to manage their brand reputation more effectively and respond more swiftly to emerging issues.
AI is capable of analysing public sentiment, automating communication tasks, and (within reason) even predicting PR crises. These are all excellent tools to add to a PR specialist’s arsenal.
7. Legal Professionals
A great deal of work in the legal field is about research: laws, regulations, precedents, documentation, case histories, and so much more.
AI is of course an incredible assistant in this type of work, with its ability to check lengthy documents in seconds and return summarised information. It can also write arguments for or against a case, assisting those legal professionals who don’t have a knack for writing.
Legal professionals of all stripes therefore have the ability to operate significantly more quickly and efficiently than those counterparts who are unequipped with AI, allowing them to work on more cases and ultimately earn greater financial rewards.
8. Education Administrators
Teaching will always be an activity best done person to person. But teaching is not the only type of work that is done in the field of education.
For education administrators, AI can personalise learning experiences, streamline administrative tasks, and enhance student engagement. Ultimately, this will do more than just improve operational efficiency – it will result in better educational outcomes for the students themselves.
9. Customer Service Managers
A similar argument to the one for marketing managers applies here: because the field of customer service is affected by AI applications in so many ways, a customer service manager should ideally have an understanding of them all.
Predictive analytics and personalised support are examples of AI functionalities that will be useful in this field, but the most relevant application nowadays is that of chatbots. These have enormously streamlined the process of dealing with customer issues in a timely, efficient manner, and any forward-looking customer service manager should know when and how to deploy them.
10. Project Managers
Project managers can assist themselves with project planning, risk management, and resource allocation. More importantly, however, it is quite likely that many in this field will have to manage projects not with AI, but about AI.
Having domain knowledge about how AI works, where to deploy it, which tools to use, which tools to invest in – that sort of expertise will be worth gold in the coming years, and a project manager who has that will correspondingly be worth more.
How to acquire AI skills
It should be clear that the potential applications for AI in non-tech fields are enormous – and yet the options to educate oneself in these technologies remain relatively limited.
Our AI for Business Course was designed to fill this gap. It will equip non-techies with the precise knowledge and skills to leverage AI in their respective fields, make themselves more valuable as professionals, and in that way, boost their financial prospects as well.
Make no mistake, AI is here to stay. Know that you can turn it into your best friend on the workplace – and you absolutely do not have to be a tech wizard to do that.
