So you think you're an AI company...
Benchmarking the companies on the Forbes AI 50 (plus three quick hits)
What does it mean to be an AI company?
Scroll through your favorite example company’s website and it probably mentions AI somewhere on the homepage. In fact, many DTC brands now mention their use of AI. AI-enhanced sparkling water anyone?
Amidst all the hype and the mad rush for AI talent (more on this later), the more discerning among us are looking for ways to better understand if a given “AI company” is really driving AI innovation or just dropping a UI on someone else’s AI.
There is no shame in leveraging someone else’s AI to build a useful product or service. But, there is certainly a difference between the two extremes of AI companies — the true innovators and the product layers.
Keep reading for a deep dive into the talent at top AI companies and a highlight reel of the latest human capital insights, including:
Benchmarking the Forbes AI 50: Explore the people at leading AI companies.
Three quick hits: Highlights of the latest human capital insights.
How did those impacted by The Great Termination fare in July?
Who is hiring the most AI/ML researchers in 2023?
Is it time for the first funeral in Metaverse?
Hiring for 100,000% revenue growth: Examine the human capital flow at the two companies on the Inc. 5000 list with over 100,000% 3-year revenue growth.
Plus, read to the bottom to submit your own human capital questions.
Are all AI companies created equal?
Human capital is the foundation for company trajectory and innovation. To better understand what (or, more correctly, “who”) makes a leading AI company, I created a panel covering over 75% of employees at the Forbes AI 50.
What is the functional breakdown of the Forbes AI 50?
Company focus will dictate specific staffing needs but, for those looking to understand human capital foundations, the below can be used as a benchmark.
Some interesting outliers:
Four companies that aren’t AI sales platforms have over 30% sales & support staff: Abnormal Security, AlphaSense, IronClad, and VectraAI.
Two companies have over 75% engineers: MosaicML and Character.AI.
Some “duh” outliers:
Sales platform companies (Gong and Clari) have more sales & support staff.
The company building AI for lawyers (Harvey) has a 6x higher % of legal staff than the average.
The companies building AI for medicine and bio have more talent in medical roles (represented above as part of “Other”).
The companies building tools used by marketers, ImagenAI (photo editing) and Tome (presentation software), have ~3x higher % of marketing & product staff.
Can you buy your way to AI prowess?
The AI 50 is going to become the AI 49… Databricks made headlines when they acquired fellow list member, MosaicML, for $20M+ per employee.
Media coverage of the acquisition highlighted two major contributing factors to the valuation of an AI/ML company — the infrastructure and the talent. While Databricks was already a leader in the AI/ML space, this massive investment ($1.3B) emphasizes the value of top talent.
The acquisition was yet another marker for Databricks as they go head-to-head with Snowflake to become the go-to location for doing data and AI/ML work. Simply, it takes AI/ML talent to build a data “playground” for AI/ML teams.
Where is all the AI talent?
Of the Forbes AI 50, 43 are US-based and 35 are California-based. While the density of innovation in California will come as a surprise to no one, there’s an interesting secondary effect…
If you want to work in AI, where you go to school matters.
Over 25% of the talent at the Forbes AI 50 companies went to school in California with Berkeley and Stanford alumni making up 9.2% of all Forbes AI 50 talent.
Even the “lesser known” California schools are dramatically overrepresented versus many of the perennial top-tier institutions. UC Irvine, San Francisco State University, and Santa Clara University all have more alumni at the AI 50 than Princeton, Yale, or Brown.
This first round of insights and benchmarking only scratches the surface of human capital insights into the companies driving the AI revolution. Subscribe below for future insights delivered straight to you.
Three quick hits
1) How did laid-off professionals fare in July?
Hundreds of thousands impacted by The Great Termination remained professionally unemployed at the end of June. The good news: 8.1% of this cohort found their next professional role in July!
Explore the employment status of laid-off professionals in more detail here.
Who’s hiring all the AI/ML researchers?
For companies looking to build at the frontier of AI and ML (versus those simply looking to adopt or leverage AI), talent with AI research experience is worth its weight in gold.
Many of the “household name” AI companies (see: OpenAI, DeepMind, etc.) have been attracting and investing in research talent for years. Other major companies are playing catch up or using their clout to recruit the best and brightest.
For the companies and institutions attracting or producing top research talent, how are these early investments going to pay dividends down the line?
Read more about the AI/ML research hiring trends so far this year.
The Metaverse’s first funeral?
From 2018 to 2022, it seemed that the Metaverse was getting built faster than you could say “cartoon Mark Zuckerberg.” However, even with thousands of employees and billions in investments major companies failed to drive adoption.
Fast forward just a handful of months and the Metaverse is a barren wasteland, with less than a quarter of the talent still working in the field.
Read more about the exodus from the Metaverse.
How do you judge “fast-growing companies”?
CareBridge and CharterUp topped Inc.’s annual list of the fastest-growing private companies in the US. Both had over 100,000% revenue growth over the past three years. But, which company is growing more efficiently?
In this case, second place isn’t the first loser. The bottom line impact of each new employee at CharterUp is 41% greater than at CareBridge.
The distinction may be trivial given just how astronomical revenue growth greater than 100,000% is. But, this opens up a can of worms on the “strict criteria” and methodology used when compiling lists and judging company trajectory.
Explore the rocketship growth at both companies below.
CharterUp
CareBridge
Explore the human capital at any company via our company directory.
What questions would you ask?
To put context around the “big numbers” of real-time job change data
— specifically, 30k+ daily changes across 90M+ people at 4M+ companies — I started asking questions of our data.
For every question, there are answers, insights, and… more questions.
I’m constantly thinking about the next batch of questions and insights to dig into. If there is a human capital data question you’re interested in exploring, leave a comment below or reach out directly via LinkedIn.