Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence is quick­ly becom­ing the next big “indus­tri­al rev­o­lu­tion”, both in this coun­try and around the globe. If you are an AI devel­op­er, this could be a “gold rush” for some great job oppor­tu­ni­ties. Those who gain expe­ri­ence in Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence today will be the AI lead­ers of tomor­row. At Media Jobs we sug­gest that if you want to get in on the ground floor of the grow­ing demand for jobs in arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence, now is the time. Many of the largest com­pa­nies includ­ing Google, Face­book, Ama­zon and Apple are quick­ly and steadi­ly acquir­ing star­tups in the arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence space to get a head start towards incor­po­rat­ing AI into all their products.

From Games to Customer Service

You may have heard about the grow­ing trend in chat­bots, par­tic­u­lar­ly with Face­book Mes­sen­ger. Bots are being launched left and right on Mes­sen­ger and oth­er mes­sag­ing plat­forms for a vari­ety of rea­sons, from enabling con­sumers to order their fast food through mes­sag­ing to even­tu­al­ly replac­ing most of the staff at cus­tomer ser­vice call cen­ters. While some of these func­tions are sim­ply query ser­vices that don’t require extra “think­ing”, many com­pa­nies and AI devel­op­ers are bet­ting big on the advances being made in AI to replace human inter­ac­tion in a vari­ety of fields.

It was all the way back in 1997 that IBM’s Deep Blue com­put­er beat world cham­pi­on Gary Kas­parov in chess. Recent­ly a pro­gram devel­oped by a British AI com­pa­ny called Deep­Mind Tech­nolo­gies beat the world cham­pi­on in a board game called “Go”. Google acquired Deep­Mind Tech­nolo­gies in 2014. The Big G also acquired DNNre­search in 2013, anoth­er deep learn­ing and neur­al net­work start­up whose tech­nol­o­gy report­ed­ly gave Google’s image search fea­ture a huge leap for­ward. Ama­zon, Yahoo, Apple, and Face­book are among the oth­er tech giants that have been gob­bling up AI soft­ware devel­op­ers in rapid suc­ces­sion, with four major acqui­si­tions in the first half of 2016 already.

An Artificial Mind for Every Purpose

Join­ing the ranks of the acquir­ers this year is Sales­force, which has made two of the four acqui­si­tions to date in 2016. It’s not hard to see how AI is being brought in to almost any imag­in­able field, from CRM, to cus­tomer ser­vice, to online com­merce, con­sumer tech, search, and much more. All of the past sci­ence fic­tion movies that depict­ed us inter­act­ing with soft­ware just as we would any human is quick­ly being born out in real­i­ty. Regard­less of your stance on the mer­its or dan­gers of arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence, what is crys­tal clear is that for the job mar­ket it promis­es mas­sive new oppor­tu­ni­ties, at least from the devel­op­er side of things.

CB Insights report­ed back in April that there have been 21 major acqui­si­tions in arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence in the last 3 years, and chances are this space is just get­ting warmed up. Twit­ter just announced their own AI start­up acqui­si­tion. If the pace con­tin­ues we’ll prob­a­bly start to see many uni­ver­si­ties expand­ing their offer­ings in this area as the next gen­er­a­tion will like­ly grow up with AI as much a part of their lives as dig­i­tal stream­ing has been for the cur­rent gen­er­a­tion of kids. And those who choose now to pur­sue a career in arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence will be part of a huge wave of job oppor­tu­ni­ties that dri­ve the future of tech­nol­o­gy and soci­ety itself.