Desperate for Data Scientists
Two remarks from an old AI guy here.<p>(1) If you&#x27;re going to hop on the &#x27;hot&#x27; AI&#x2F;ML&#x2F;DS bandwagon, make sure that you actually have &#x27;work&#x27; for the highly coveted person you are trying to hire. &#x27;Everyone else is doing it&#x27;, &#x27;all our clients have data, so selling them data-sciency projects shoudn&#x27;t be a problem&#x27;, &#x27;Hire a first DS person, to have them start a brand new DS division&#x27; are things that probably are doomed to fail. 
If you weren&#x27;t selling classic Data Analyses&#x2F;Intelligence services before, chances are you are lacking the foundation  in your sales and support staff, and maybe even your customer type, to be able to embed this into your company and into a new line of business. The risk your prize new employee will walk to greener horizons to work with peers on exiting real projects is high.<p>(2) Know where you are heading. If you just want to embellish your &#x27;normal&#x27; projects with some gimmicks from the online &#x27;Cognitive Services&#x27; api&#x27;s offered by the various vendors, then yes, sending some of your regular staff on a quick &#x27;boot-camp&#x27; style course will probably work. You  don&#x27;t need a &#x27;data-scientist&#x27; for that. And if you hire a real one for that type of work he&#x27;ll probably walk within 2 weeks.