How to get paid more in IT

Get Paid with AI

We all go to work to get paid, and IT professionals this week were keen to find out more on the subject, devouring our article on the highest-paying IT skills of 2025.  

What they really wanted to understand is how much does AI pay? Being an AI-infused chatbot, you would expect Smart Answers to know the answer. And fueled by decades of authoritative human reporting, it does.  

Tech professionals with AI expertise earn approximately 18% more than their counterparts without these skills, says Smart Answers. AI engineers experienced more than 12% salary growth compared to the previous year, while mid-level AI workers saw a 20% increase. Employers are willing to pay as much as 47% more for IT professionals who possess generative AI skills. 

Find out: How much more do AI skills pay in 2025?  

How to Win with Gen AI

While people like to get paid, the ultimate goal for many organizations is to generate cold hard cash. We often hear that enterprise data can be a hidden treasure trove, and this week we reported on how to safely monetize it by zeroing in on actionable value and guarding against common risks. Finding untapped gold isn’t easy, after all.  

CIO readers wanted to know more generally how organizations can get beyond the hype and generate real value from their data using generative AI (genAI). It’s a big and much-debated question (see: How to win at AI: think like a systems designer, not a tech shopper).  

Smart Answers’ advice for becoming genAI ready includes effective and connected data storage, retrieval, and processing, supported by a well-structured data architecture. Risk governance is essential, as is a focus on long-term strategy, quality data, and clear objectives, ensuring alignment across teams for a successful AI program. 

Find out: What needs to be in place for effective enterprise generative AI? 

Data Management FTW

What metrics do business and tech leaders trust for measuring ROI on dataops, data governance, and data security? This week, we asked the experts and the resulting story (‘Measuring success in dataops, data governance, and data security‘) was a big hit with the readers of InfoWorld.  

This prompted those readers to delve into the wider benefits of a strong data-management strategy. Beyond providing a strong platform for AI success, consistent and uniform data leads to better, more comprehensive decision support. Clear rules for data processes enhance business and IT agility and scalability, and central control mechanisms reduce costs in other areas of data management. 

Find out: What are the key benefits of a strong data management strategy?  

About Smart Answers 

Smart Answers is an AI-based chatbot tool designed to help you discover content, answer questions, and go deep on the topics that matter to you. Each week we send you the three most popular questions asked by our readers, and the answers Smart Answers provides.  

Developed in partnership with Miso.ai, Smart Answers draws only on editorial content from our network of trusted media brands—CIO, Computerworld, CSO, InfoWorld, and Network World—and was trained on questions that a savvy enterprise IT audience would ask. The result is a fast, efficient way for you to get more value from our content.