The Next AI Talent War May Be for Experts, Not Engineers.

For years, the AI talent conversation has focused on the obvious people:

💻 Software engineers
🤖 Machine learning engineers
📊 Data scientists
🧠 AI researchers

But a company called Snorkel AI just gave us a glimpse of what the next AI talent shortage might look like.

And it may have surprisingly little to do with building models.

Snorkel works with frontier AI companies to create and evaluate the increasingly sophisticated data needed to train advanced AI systems.

Its annualized revenue run rate reportedly jumped from roughly $20 million to more than $350 million in about a year.

But here's the part that caught my attention:

Snorkel combines AI automation with a network of tens of thousands of human experts across fields like coding, law, medicine and other specialized disciplines.

Why?

Because increasingly capable AI still needs people who can define:

🎯 What a good answer looks like
🧠 What real expertise looks like
⚠️ Where an answer goes wrong
📊 How quality should be evaluated
🔍 What nuance a general model might miss

That's an interesting twist in the AI/jobs conversation.

We're spending enormous amounts of time asking:

“Will AI replace experts?”

But the next phase may create another question:

“Where do we find enough experts to teach AI what expertise actually looks like?”

💭 Brett’s Perspective

This is where I think the AI talent conversation gets much more interesting.

AI can absorb information at extraordinary scale.

But information and expertise aren't the same thing.

Expertise includes judgment.

Context.

Pattern recognition built through experience.

Knowing when the technically correct answer is still the wrong answer.

And understanding the exceptions that aren't written neatly in the manual.

As AI becomes more capable, companies may increasingly need people who can transfer that expertise into the systems they're building.

That changes the AI talent map.

The person contributing to the next generation of AI might not have “AI” anywhere on their résumé.

They might be a:

⚖️ Lawyer
🩺 Physician
🔧 Engineer
💻 Developer
🏭 Manufacturing specialist
📈 Financial analyst
🔬 Scientist

Or someone with 20 years of experience doing something exceptionally well.

Maybe AI doesn't make expertise less valuable.

Maybe it makes expertise part of the infrastructure.

And if that's true, Talent Intelligence has a much bigger role to play in the AI economy than simply finding more AI engineers.