Why AI is key to hiring and retaining developers

Data shows that the opportunity to build AI-powered apps figures very prominently in where developers decide to work.

It’s high time to treat HR as every bit as important to your company’s artificial intelligence strategy as IT.

Alongside all the evidence that getting your developers working on AI is good for your business, there’s mounting proof that even providing the opportunity to work on—and work with—AI has a positive effect on job satisfaction, recruitment, and retention.

Getting this right matters a lot today. In 2022, McKinsey’s State of AI Report notes that “[s]oftware engineers emerged as the AI role that survey responses show organizations hired most often in the past year, more often than data engineers and AI data scientists … another clear sign that many organizations have largely shifted from experimenting with AI to actively embedding it in enterprise applications.”

And the stakes are high. In the data gathered for the latest State of the Data Race report, the developers most tapped into next-generation technologies (these are developers who describe themselves as “the first in their organization to learn about new tools and technologies” and those upon whom others rely on for answers about new tech) describe interacting with real-time data and building AI and ML-powered apps as the most important factors in deciding where to work.

Overall, developers in organizations with both AI and ML widely deployed were 15 percentage points more likely than those in organizations where AI and ML are in “the early days” of deployment to say that “tech is more exciting than ever.” Similarly, they were 18 points more likely to say they felt “energized” about their jobs.

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