Companies racing to make AI useful are paying a steep premium for hands-on talent. PromptQL, an enterprise platform spun out of Hasura, is paying its AI engineers $900 an hour to act as consultants who build and deploy agents on top of corporate data—a rate that exceeds many Big Four partners. The company says clients aren’t balking amid a shortage of experts who can debug models, stand up data pipelines, and integrate LLMs into legacy systems. Recruiters report unprecedented competition for senior AI talent, while consultants say project pricing climbs when AI is involved. A recent MIT NANDA study found 95% of revenue-focused gen-AI pilots failed, a statistic executives cite as justification for paying for execution, not just strategy. PromptQL’s forward-deployed model blurs sales and engineering, challenging traditional consulting norms as enterprises seek measurable outcomes from AI after two years of experimentation.
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