Almost half of tech leaders want AI talent with ethics

What do companies want most when hiring for AI-related roles? Someone with ethics.

According to a recent IEEE study, 44% of technology leaders ranked AI ethical practices as a top skill they’d like to see from candidates applying for AI roles.

The study surveyed 400 technology leaders from Brazil, China, Japan, India, the UK, and US. Other top skills wanted from AI hires included data analysis (38%), machine learning (34%), and data modeling (32%).

What exactly are AI ethics skills? IEEE fellow Karen Panetta told IT Brew she defines AI ethical practices as a professional’s ability to keep humans in the loop, as well as their ability to evaluate data funneled into AI for bias.

“[AI] should never replace a human in the final decision process, especially if it affects somebody’s career, their health, or some other performance decision,” Panetta said. “The other piece of it is understanding where or what’s in the model, and where it came from and its limitations.”

AI ethics in the wild. Since 2019, there have been more than 35,000 US job postings with keywords related to AI ethical practices, with almost half (16,560) of these mentions coming from job posts created between November 2024 and October, according to Lightcast data shared with IT Brew. The top IT gigs with job listings mentioning these skills were AI engineers, database architects, and cybersecurity and information security analysts.

Sydnee Mayers, a product lead for AI at software company Cribl, told IT Brew that AI ethics is something she thinks about when hiring for AI roles. She has assessed candidates for these skills by asking them to answer a “tough” question about an AI scenario where ethics comes into play.

“I can tell right away whether this is something they’ve had to deal with or a concept that they’ve had to wrestle with in their mind and then come up with an answer,” she said.

Mayers added that companies can also evaluate a candidate’s sense of AI ethics by giving them a case study to better understand how they interact with AI.

“Give them a prompt that’s pushing the limit a little bit and see how they respond to it,” Mayers said.

Soft skills era. Ethics aren’t the only soft skills technology leaders desire from AI hires. Mayers said she seeks professionals who are good communicators and can speak about technology in a way that business leaders can understand.

Panetta added that the best AI hires are inquisitive and can find issues in AI products, a skill that is helpful when it comes to finding jailbreak vulnerabilities.

“If they can think of scenarios where [a product] won’t work, that is an amazing skill to have.”