The best-paid AI specialists might work in banks, not hedge funds
How well could working with AI pay if you are in London? Very well – $2m per head if you’re at OpenAI, for example. But how well does working with AI pay outside of the frontier labs?
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A recent salary survey from recruitment firm Octavius Finance suggested that it is nowhere near that, perhaps predictably. It is London, after all.
Starting pay for an “Agentic AI Investment Analyst” varies between £35k ($47k) and £70k ($94k) depending on if you work at a consultancy/fintech, bank, or hedge fund, according to Octavius Finance. The highest salaries are at banks, where they range between £60k ($80k) and £70k ($94k), and also comes with a 10% to 20% bonus. Bonuses at hedge funds can be higher, although base salaries start lower.
For slightly more experienced AI analysts – those with 2 to 4 years of experience – salaries are highest at banks, where Octavius Finance says they are between £70k ($94k) and £85k ($114k), and at hedge funds, where they are between £60k ($80k) and £80k ($107k). They are lowest at consultancies and fintechs, where the range is just £45k ($60k) to £55k ($74k).
Bonuses, however, complicate things. For “senior” AI analysts at banks, Octavius Finance says these can be between 15% and 20% of salary, while at hedge funds, these can be 30% of salary upwards. At consultancies/fintechs, they are just 5% to 10% of salary.
Octavius Finance notes that there isn’t salary data for more senior roles than the above “because this is a new role with insufficient longer-tenure salary data,” amusingly. Who knows what these roles will offer in a few years, or if they will even exist at all then.
Either way, the pay isn’t high. A cursory look at job openings at Anthropic or OpenAI in San Francisco, where the firms are legally required to disclose compensation, rarely shows salaries below $200k, no matter the job title or level of experience. Those aren’t exactly like-for-like; Octavius Finance notes that the roles above refer to “applying and evaluating agents in investment research, rather than engineering the underlying AI infrastructure.”
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