According to Artificial Intelligence Index Report 2019, “In the US, the share of Artificial Intelligence jobs grew from 0.4% in 2012 to 0.9% of total jobs posted in 2019. The labour demand is ever-growing especially in the manufacturing sectors and high tech services which are willing to hire the best AI developers”.
With the growing appetite for top-level solutions and an extreme shortage of tech specialists, many companies are forced to look for substitutions for the old in-house recruitment. The following are the how and whys of creating a successful software development team for your next AI-powered project in Ukraine.
Acuteshortage of AI software developers in the UK and the US
In 2019, approximately 11B US dollars werespent on both Artificial Intelligence business operations and intelligentprocess automation. According to the Gartner report, this number is expected toincrease extensively in the upcoming years, and AI is predicted to create 2.5million jobs by the end of 2020.
As the desire for AI-powered solutions isincreasing, there is a stark talent war presented for AI software developersand machine learning, and both of these top upstarts and tech powerhouses aregoing to great lengths to hire the best and experienced AI developers. Forexample, US companies are raising over 1 Billion US dollars to hire AI softwaredevelopers by the end of 2020.
No doubt that they are all doing it for goodreasons as all of them want to reap the harvest in the long run. For example,BNY Mellon incorporated machine and process automation learning into theirbanking ecosystem. And by doing this, the bank managed to get approximately$300,000 in annual savings.
Therefore, it does not come as a surprise that companies are setting up development and research centers, AI hubs and are snapping up the best Machine Learning, Data Science and AI specialists from all over the globe, including IT hubs as Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, and other Eastern European countries.
According to Indeed’s AI talent report, over the period of the last three to four years alone, the number of AI-related job postings on Indeed.com has increased by 120%.
Many companies are opting for outsourcing asthe number of companies looking to hire AI developers is increasing as comparedto the availability of experts.
Why youshould look for experts in AI & machine learning in Ukraine?
Strong educational background
Ukraine has one of the strongest STEM-based educational backgrounds. There are many universities in Ukraine that offer Master’s programs in Computer Science with a specialization in Data Science. The Master’s Program in Computer and Data Science enables aspiring candidates to acquire skills in data analytics, programming, artificial intelligence, machine learning, product development, big data system architecture and provides self-development and leadership courses for its students.
Comprehensiveexpertise of Ukrainian AI software developers
Artificial intelligence is one of the fastest-growing areas of expertise in Ukraine. The overall expertise varies from robotics to ML and recommendation systems. Machine learning in Ukraine accounts for more than a quarter of projects that the Ukrainian companies work with. In Ukraine, artificial intelligence has a wide variety of applications across many industries, including fintech, IT, advertising and marketing, etc.
Wide choice of trusted Big Data and AI software development companies
Ukraine is the home to 193,000+ software engineers and 1,500+ software development providers. Ukraine and other countries of Eastern Europe are home to a wide variety of reliable Artificial Intelligence developing software companies. According to Clutch, there are approximately 160 Big Data analytics and machine learning companies. This Clutch data indicates that countries such as Poland and Ukraine are taking the lead by the number of Artificial Intelligence providers as compared to the Western European countries.
There are a large number of companies that outsource their artificial intelligence and machine learning Ukraine and Eastern Europe and have also profited from such type of cooperation.
A booming talent pool of AI software developers and Big Data engineers
According to a report by Linkedin, the numberof experts ready to work in machine learning and artificial intelligence inUkraine exceeds approximately 31,000. The country has a rich resource ofsoftware engineers that specialize in technologies such as Python and Scalathat are extensively used for Machine Learning and Data Science and also the ApacheHadoop framework that is used for Big Data engineering.
Pythondevelopers in Ukraine
About 94% of all Machine Learning engineers andData Scientists around the world are using Python and R. Scala and C are theother languages that they use
One of the most preferred Data Science languageused in the world is Python, and its market share is increasing exponentially. About49% of the data scientists with six or fewer years of experience have ratedPython as their favorite programming language. Although R is good for makingprototypes fast, creating state-of-the-art algorithms and data analysis, Pythonhas many libraries for Machine Learning making it really good for makinganalysis, prototyping, putting into production and for better performance thanR.
Python is one of the five most widely usedcoding languages in Ukraine, and now the market share of Python is increasingas it is a dominant technology among Ukrainian Data Scientists.
A thriving community of AI software developers
Ukraine has an energetic community of enthusiasts and AI gurus. The country hosts a large number of Machine Learning and Big Data Artificial Intelligence events including international conferences such as AI Ukraine Conference, AI & Big Data Day, JEEConf, etc.
Local communities also establish workshops and regular meetups for analytics experts and big data, such as DS success Meetup, Bottleneck Night AI/ML, etc.
Examplesof projects Ukrainian AI software developers worked on
The AI software developer engineers of Ukraine have adequate experience as most of the AI-powered startups were born in Ukraine or fashioned in collaboration with Ukrainian software engineers. These cutting-edge solutions include Grammarly, Cargofy, Datarobot, Discoperi.
Cargofy is anAI-enabled solution for cargo delivery optimizations. It works as same as the Uberbusiness model and connects the truck drivers with the customers that requiredelivery of cargo.
Grammarly is the Ukrainian-US startup that has a Natural Language Processing technology at its center. It is one of the world leaders in the market of the writing-enhancement tool.
Petcube, a highlycrowdfunded Ukrainian startup, powers machine learning models for its petdetection technology.
Discopery is a pioneeringstartup that produces a smart solution to save lives and to prevent caraccidents. The solution is powered by ML algorithms.
DataRobot is a machinelearning platform that helps enterprises to build prophetic models at a highspeed and has raised up to 54 million US dollars in a Series C funding roundled by New Enterprise Associates (NEA). According to a local IT industryresource DOU.UA, the company has an R&D office in Kyiv (Kiev), with up to300 employees working there.
How tochoose AI software developers in Ukraine?
It is critical to choose the candidates who can help you turn your idea into real KPIs while looking for experts in AI in Ukraine. They will tell you of its viability and can offer flexible expertise that is required towards Machine Learning and AI as it differs significantly across different businesses.
For example, some companies will only deal with lucid visualization and collection of data (such as retail stores that need to see that some goods don’t sell in certain stores or banks that need to have all the data collected from CRMs) and therefore will require Big Data engineers.
Some businesses will need to apply the readymodels and algorithms developed by IBM, Google, and other systems (for example,e-commerce stores that need plug-and-play recommendation systems). If such isthe case, you will need a machine learning engineer who can implement thesystem focusing on your business domain and specific data. The expert needs toobtain the data from different sources and then transform it to make it reliablefor this particular system, visualize the findings and receive the results.
The big data engineers and a big data architectare responsible for creating a suitable big data engineering ecosystem (basedon Spark or Apache Hadoop). It allows collecting, storing, integrating and processinglarge amounts of data from various siloed data sources.
Data scientists also have the need to refine the data further to make it more appropriate for a specific business case. Machine learning engineers and data scientists are required to apply appropriate algorithms, create models based on these algorithms, fine-tuning the models and reequip the models with new data.
Business intelligence specialists are in charge of the visualization of insights. Besides that, you may also need front-end developers to create dashboards with easy-to-use UI.
Sum-up
The demand for AI talent is rising, and the battle for it is on the verge. Many businesses choose to collaborate with AI software developers in Ukraine to get a reasonable advantage without suffering any losses. This is a balanced choice owing to the favourable combination of the Ukrainian AI talent market characteristics: a strong tech background, a thriving talent pool, a booming community of AI/ Data Science/Machine Learning Engineers, and the substantial number of reliable AI software development companies with a proven track record of successful projects.