I would tend to think that many companies unfortunately do not even understand what to expect out of these talents. While everybody needs data scientists and AI experts when their data strategy itself is not in place. I have closely witnessed when these short supply of talented individuals (many of them are PhD’s; as hiring companies wouldn’t settle for anyone less than a PhD) are hired to build data pipeline, data lakes and miscellaneous non data science specific capabilities. And for this non availability of fundamental ingredient (data), slowly the job requirements have started to specify data management (and data pipeline building) as AI pre-requisites. Clearly there will be an scarcity of finding someone with all the skills of a software engineer + data management expert + programmer + mathematical genius + Hadoop administrator + AI architect + and 10’s of other skills which may or may not be the focus area of a data scientist. Sad situation !