Now hiring: Natural prompt engineer with ‘analytical judgment’

Some companies are preparing for an AI future by valuing employees who have a more human attribute: EI, or emotional intelligence.

Recent job postings on LinkedIn suggest traits like critical thinking and communication skills could become more highly valued among IT professionals, demonstrating the importance of thoughtful, human consideration in an AI future, where tech-generated outputs must be carefully analyzed before prompting important business decisions.

And in a recent Microsoft-led survey of 31,000 full-time and self-employed global workers, which included business decision-makers, managers, and employees, the traits of “analytical judgment,” “flexibility,” and “emotional intelligence” ranked top on the skills list for an AI-powered future.

Seth Robinson, VP of industry research at the nonprofit trade organization CompTIA, told IT Brew that a language-learning model’s query responses must be carefully considered, especially when the answers are surprising ones.

“Some of the beauty of AI is that it can give you results that you would have never expected,” Robinson said. “You have to be able to have the awareness and some of the emotional intelligence and situational intelligence to understand…is that unexpected result actually a step in the right direction? Or do we need to do some more tweaking?”

Be prompt. Generative AI has already created new professions, like “natural prompt engineer,” to help tweak natural-language learning models.

“You need to train that model with at least 500 different questions…so the role of the prompt engineer is not to come up with the answers. It’s to come up with the questions,” said Mohamed Kande, US consulting solutions co-leader and global advisory leader at PwC, during a May tech showcase in New York City.

Those questions need to be thoughtful ones, requiring some of that analytical judgment and emotional intelligence. A prompt engineer may need to fine-tune language models according to client-specific requirements.

A May job posting for a prompt engineer called for a range of qualifications, like knowledge of structured and unstructured data sources, experience with APIs, and you guessed it, “excellent problem-solving and analytical skills.”

The payoff of the AI-fueled job market remains to be seen.

On June 28, 2023, a LinkedIn search for “prompt engineer” yielded 277 US job openings. In April, a spokesperson for the professional networking site told Time that posts referring to “generative AI” increased 36-fold from last year.

Avoiding off-putting output. Creating an unbiased chatbot is “an impossible goal,” the Brookings Institution wrote in May, as small changes in the construction of a prompt can lead to different outputs—a conclusion that gives a certain power to the inputter.

AI engineers of the future will need to understand data inputs and outputs and modify the prompts accordingly.

“As I see the results, I’m going to make it more and more precise for the particular use case that I’m trying to deliver. And that’s really what it is. And it’s not that technical. It is literally just talking to a large language model and telling it to do different things,” said Nick White, data strategy director at the consultancy Kin + Carta, imagining the role of the prompt engineer.

PwC has an upskilling program to support education among employees in emerging technologies, but the firm doesn’t expect to be “minting PhDs in quantum AI immediately,” as Joe Atkinson, US chief products and technology officer at PwC, put it.

“We want them to be upskilling across the board, not just in…AI but also in…counseling, all those human-centered skills,” said Julia Lamm, partner in PwC’s workforce transformation practice.