The demand for prompt engineers – one of the most in-demand new AI-related roles since generative AI came into the spotlight – is stabilising. Staffing experts are noticing a plateauing in the need for specialist prompt engineers, with businesses seeking AI engineers with a broader skill set as techniques like retrieval augment generation or grounding, fine-tuning, and continual pre-training are seeing increasing innovation and relevance, and tools to automate prompt optimisation are emerging.
Prompt engineers are people who optimise prompts to ensure accurate and desirable output from Gen AI models.
“Prompt engineering and demand for prompt engineers is by scope and nature highly seasonal and short-termed,” said Krishna Gautam, business head – direct hiring – at specialist staffing firm Xpheno. “The role’s eventual output is to enhance the intuitive capabilities of the AI, including the ability to autonomously frame, test and calibrate prompts. Given this specific nature of the stack, prompt engineering will eventually phase out itself from being a significant part of the AI capacity matrix of enterprises.”
The industry is seeing flattish demand lines for prompt engineering in between major build phases of AI tools, Gautam noted. Globally, active demand was nearly flat for the past three quarters and is now seeing a comparative rise.
“We are seeing that clients are asking more for holistic gen AI engineers having experience in other gen AI related areas apart from prompt engineering,” said Aniruddha Chakrabarti, partner, AI and cloud, Grant Thornton Bharat.
More and more employers are looking for candidates with skill sets across the AI spectrum including broader understanding of foundational models and large language models, AI ethics, responsible AI, security and governance, data and cloud AI services.
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“We see interest in prompt engineering peaked in 2023, and after that has reached a steady middle ground. We see the same trend in India also,” Chakrabarti said, citing a Google trend report. “We believe in the long term, the demand for pure prompt engineers might taper down.”Going forward, prompt engineering will be just one of the tools to achieve accurate Gen AI output, needed in combination with a range of other techniques such as retrieval augment generation or grounding, fine-tuning, and continual pre-training, where significant innovation is happening.
In the future, AI itself might help in crafting the most optimal prompts.
“Today, only 7% of companies using generative AI employ prompt engineers, and AI systems are beginning to handle prompts on their own,” said Neeti Sharma, CEO, Teamlease Digital.
“In India, this shift means more focus on roles that manage and improve AI systems, combining tech skills and industry knowledge to make AI strategies work effectively across different fields.”
By 2027, over 50% of enterprise GenAI models will be tailored to specific industries, such as healthcare, Sharma said.
Experts noted that having an in-depth knowledge of AI architecture, the AI tech stack including how foundational models behave, and how to enrich responses with contextual enterprise data are growing increasingly important.
