AI engineers are being paid a premium to work as consultants to help large companies troubleshoot, adopt, and integrate AI with enterprise data—something traditional consultants may not be able to do.
PromptQL, an enterprise AI platform created by San Francisco-based developer tooling company Hasura, is doling out $900-per-hour wages to its engineers tasked with building and deploying AI agents to analyze internal company data using large language models (LLMs).
The price point reflects the “intuition” and technical skills needed to keep pace with a rapidly-changing technology, Tanmai Gopal, PromptQL’s cofounder and CEO, told Fortune.
Gopal said the company hourly wage for AI engineers as consultants is “aligned with the going rate that you would see for AI engineers,” but that “it feels like we should be increasing that price even more,” as customers aren’t pushing back on the price PromptQL sets.
“MBA types… are very strategic thinkers, and they’re smart people, but they don’t have an intuition for what AI can do,” Gopal said.
Gopal declined to disclose any customers that have used PromptQL to integrate AI into their businesses, but says the list includes “the largest networking company” as well as top fast food, e-commerce, grocery and food delivery tech companies, and “one of the largest B2B companies.”
Oana Iordăchescu, founder of Deep Tech Recruitment, a boutique agency focused on AI, quantum, and frontier tech talent, told Fortune enterprises and startups are competing for senior AI engineers at “unprecedented rates,” and which is leading to wage inflation.
Iordăchescu said the wages are priced “far above even Big Four consulting partners,” who often make around $400 to $600 per hour.
“Traditional management consultants can design AI strategies, but most lack the hands-on technical expertise to debug models, build pipelines, or integrate systems into legacy infrastructure,” Iordăchescu said. “AI engineers working as consultants bridge that gap. They don’t just advise, they execute.”
AI consultant Rob Howard told Fortune he wasn’t surprised at “mind-blowing numbers” like a $900-per-hour wage for AI consulting work, as he’s seen a price premium on projects that have an AI component while companies rush to adopt it into their businesses.
Howard, who is also the CEO Innovating with AI, a program to teach people to become AI consultants in their own right, said some students of his have sold AI trainings or two-day boot camps that net out to $400 or $500 per hour.
“The pricing for this is high in general across the market, because it’s in demand and new and relatively rare to find, you know, people who are qualified to do it,” Howard said.
A recent report published by MIT’s NANDA initiative, revealed that while generative AI holds promise for enterprises, 95% of initiatives to drive rapid revenue growth failed. Aditya Challapally, the lead author of the report and a research contributor to project NANDA at MIT, previously told Fortune the AI pilot program failures did not fall on the quality of the AI models, but the “learning gap” for both tools and organizations.
“Some large companies’ pilots and younger startups are really excelling with generative AI,” Challapally told Fortune earlier this month. Startups led by 19- or 20-year-olds, for example, “have seen revenues jump from zero to $20 million in a year,” he said.
“It’s because they pick one pain point, execute well, and partner smartly with companies who use their tools,” he added.
Jim Johson, an AI consulting executive at AnswerRocket, told Fortune the $900-per-hour wage “makes perfect sense” when considering companies have spent two years experimenting with AI and “have little to show for it.”
“Now the pressure’s on to demonstrate real progress, and they’re discovering there’s no easy button for enterprise AI,” Johnson said. “This premium won’t last forever, but right now companies are essentially buying insurance against joining that 95% failure statistic.”
Gopal said PromptQL’s business model to have AI engineers serve as both consultants and forward deployed engineers (FDEs)—hybrid sales and engineering jobs tasked with integrating AI solutions—is what makes their employees so valuable.
This new wave of AI engineer consultants is shaking up the consulting industry, Gopal said. But he sees his company as helping shift traditional consulting partnership expectations and culture.
“The demand is there,” he said. “I think what makes it hard is that leaders, especially in some of the established companies… are kind of more used to the traditional style of consultants.”
Gopal said the challenge for his company will be to “drive that leadership and education, and saying, ‘Folks, there is a new way of doing things.’”
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