How to Talk to Humans: AI Trainer Emerges as a Fast-Growing Profession in Russia
One of the youngest professions on the market is the AI trainer. These specialists “raise” artificial intelligence by teaching it how to communicate properly with people. Yet only one in ten candidates for such roles actually meets the requirements.
Teach the Scholar
Representatives of this new profession do not write code in the classical sense. Their task is more subtle. They train artificial intelligence to interact correctly with humans. Their responsibilities include preparing training datasets for neural networks, writing reference dialogues, and testing how systems respond in real conversational scenarios.
“A specialist stops being an ‘annotator’ and becomes someone who understands how the model will interpret information,” explains Anna Safronova, head of IT recruitment at the staffing company UTEAM.
The labor market reacted quickly. Demand for such experts jumped by roughly 80% in 2025. The paradox is that only about 10% of applicants actually possess the required skills. Even more striking is who makes up that qualified group. Many come from the humanities, including philologists, journalists, editors, and educators.
It turns out that training AI critically depends on deep language understanding, strong text skills, and critical thinking. These are competencies that humanities programs have been cultivating for decades.
Assembling Meaning
The geography of AI trainer vacancies is highly concentrated. About 65% are located in Russia’s Central Federal District, reflecting strong demand in the capital region for “educating” artificial intelligence. By industry, IT and internet companies lead with 28% of openings, followed by the financial sector at 18%. Creative industries also offer opportunities. Media, marketing, design, and PR together account for 5% of the market, the same share as consulting and other business services. The profession’s earning potential is confirmed by salary data. The average pay now stands at 104,300 rubles (around $1,250), which is 12,500 rubles (roughly $150) higher than a year ago.
The main hiring players are tech giants Yandex and Sber, both actively developing their own AI products. Yandex is seeking experts in linguistics, law, medicine, and, naturally, programmers to train neural networks. Sber, by contrast, places a strong emphasis on philologists and translators. Despite the activity of these heavyweights, the broader trend is clear. The market is moving from hype to maturity. There are fewer vacancies today than at the peak of demand two to three years ago.
Text and Test
“The IT profession is at the height of its popularity, so the key challenge today is no longer chasing the quantity of IT personnel, but improving their quality. This task can also be addressed effectively through ‘digital departments’ created in close partnership between business and the state,” said Sergey Plugotarenko, former CEO of the Digital Economy Autonomous Nonprofit Organization.
Educational initiatives such as digital departments at universities underscore the growing demand for interdisciplinary training in the digital economy. In 2022–2023, more than 280,000 students from a wide range of fields, including engineering, medicine, management, and creative disciplines, completed additional IT training.
The current surge of interest in AI trainers is a logical stage in the evolution of the IT market. Over recent years, a clear trend has emerged toward convergence between technical and humanities disciplines. Skills fostered by humanities education, including critical thinking, communication, and analysis, were increasingly valued in roles such as business analyst or product manager. For a long time, purely technical education remained an unquestioned baseline requirement for most IT jobs. The rise of the AI trainer profession marks one of the first cases where a humanities background has shifted from a “nice-to-have” to a mandatory entry requirement, signaling a qualitatively new phase.
AI Looks for Understanding
What comes next? Anna Safronova outlines the outlook. “Today, an AI training specialist is part of the infrastructure of large models that are trained on human data. That means we need people who can design these datasets, manage quality, and define boundaries,” she says. Demand for such hybrid specialists will continue to grow as AI is embedded across a wide range of business processes. This will create opportunities for new educational programs and retraining courses. Moreover, Russian companies that successfully develop this segment may gain a chance to offer AI training and fine-tuning expertise on the global market.
The rapid emergence and growth of the AI trainer profession shows that advances in AI, especially in language processing, are shifting the focus toward meaning rather than algorithms alone. Humanities specialists are now seen as a valuable talent pool for technology companies, particularly for tasks related to model training and high-quality content creation. Alexey Onosov, founder of Unisoft, agrees. “Humanities graduates have unexpectedly become more in demand in IT than ever before.”
