For hard-hit tech workers, AI is a silver lining

After pivoting her startup from business operations software to customer service ticketing through AI, Sophie Wyne saw interest skyrocket.

“I actually have never seen this amount of interest before for a product,” said Wyne, founder and chief executive of Ariglad in San Francisco. “It’s really just combining two things which people are really caring about. One is AI — I think everyone’s really interested in how can that actually help my day-to-day in reality and not be so abstract. And the other side is, I just hate updating my knowledge base.”

Among the hundreds of AI startups looking for talent is Quest Labs, a Bay Area firm co-founded by Debparna Pratiher. The 27-year-old previously worked as a product manager at Nvidia, the highly publicized Silicon Valley supplier of chips used in gaming and other high-performance computing, particularly AI.

Pratiher is an alumnus of UC Davis and Carnegie Mellon University. Her firm, with seed money from Techstars and Afore Capital, has a staff of about 20. The business has been moving quickly to build data sets for ecommerce as Google has started to phase out third-party cookies, which track and learn what users are doing online. “If cookies are gone, you’re blind to consumers,” Pratiher said.

She said she’s had difficulty finding qualified data scientists and other AI engineers with deep experience in machine language learning.

“For all the AI hype and interest, buyers need to adopt the technology, and for that, they need better data,” Pratiher said.

For those recently laid off, getting up to speed on machine language learning and other in-demand AI skills isn’t as daunting as one might think. Some skills, such as learning programming languages and databases to build AI models, might take a matter of weeks for IT workers.

Even those with little or no experience in tech have been able to pivot.

Shakil Kamran attended a Salesforce conference in 2017, set on trying to break into tech and transition out of his retail management career, which regularly involved 60-hour weeks and left little time to spend with his son.

He took courses through Trailhead, San Francisco-based Salesforce’s online learning platform, increased his skills and began seeing AI as the future. Today, Kamran, 37, is a Salesforce consultant and focuses on helping organizations use AI to help their business grow.

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