I would never call myself an “AI Engineer” unless I was actually building custom LLMs. For the last 7 years, I’ve specialized in “cloud native development” and

I would never call myself an “AI Engineer” unless I was actually building custom LLMs. For the last 7 years, I’ve specialized in “cloud native development” and the last five working more in strategy and leading implementations working for consulting companies full time. Gen AI is just another tool in my tool belt. One of my specialties before Gen AI was working with Amazon Connect - a cloud hosted call center + Amazon Lex (the AWS version of Alexa) for voice, text and web and chatbots. I use Gen AI to understand customer’s utterances better with Bedrock. But at the end of the day, it’s really just another AWS SDK (Boto3) call. But my day to day is more about working with clients gathering requirements, integrating call centers with their backends, and everything that goes into a modern implementation - regular development, infrastructure as code, “DevOps” [sic], training, solving XYProblems, etc. I spend a lot of time telling clients “Gen AI isn’t what you want”. You don’t want Gen AI being responsible for output to customers, maybe a standard ML implementation might be better, etc.