Why 'AI Engineer' Is Already An Outdated Job Title

InnovationWhy 'AI Engineer' Is Already An Outdated Job TitleByElton Chan,Forbes Councils Member.for Forbes Technology CouncilCOUNCIL POSTExpertise from Forbes Councils members, operated under license. Opinions expressed are those of the author. | Membership (fee-based)May 29, 2026, 10:00am EDTElton Chan is the Co-Founder of Second Talent, a solution that connects global tech leaders with AI-native engineering talent across Asia. getty​Three years ago, the job title "AI engineer" barely existed. Today, it has split into 10 different roles. The World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2025 ranks AI and machine learning specialists among the three fastest-growing roles in the world, projecting roughly 85% growth by 2030.​The Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2025 also shows 84% of professional developers now use AI tools at work, but fewer than 5% of developers identify as AI engineers, data scientists or ML specialists, even as many use AI tools daily.​ The gap between those two numbers is the problem.Most companies are still trying to fill that gap with one hire. They post a job called "AI engineer." They list eight things the person should do and wait. The role sits open for months, and they wonder why.​The reason is that "AI engineer" has become an outdated job title, and there are several AI engineer roles that require fundamentally different skill sets, workflows and operating models.​The Same Pattern, FasterThis split has happened before. In the 2010s, "web developer" became front end, back end, mobile, DevOps and SRE. Companies that hired specialists shipped faster than companies that kept hiring one generalist, and the market rewarded the split.The AI version is faster. I first started to see stable AI engineer job descriptions appear in early 2023. By mid-2024, the role had already split into LLM engineer, prompt engineer, RAG engineer and AI agent engineer. In 2026, other entries include AI automation...