Should you hire an AI engineer?

Over the past year, I've noticed a shift in the conversations we're having with businesses.

A year ago, the question was: Should we invest in AI? Today it's: Should we hire an AI Engineer?

On the surface, that feels like progress - organisations are moving beyond experimentation and investing in internal capability. But I think there's a misconception emerging. Whilst hiring an AI Engineer is an important milestone, it isn't an AI strategy.

Too often, organisations expect a single hire to solve a challenge that's fundamentally organisational. They're expected to evaluate tools, build agents, redesign workflows, train colleagues, influence leadership, establish governance, integrate systems, measure ROI and somehow keep pace with one of the fastest moving technologies we've ever seen.

That's an impossible brief. Not because the individual isn't capable, but because AI transformation has never been a one person job.

We've seen this pattern before. Businesses didn't digitally transform because they hired one developer. They didn't become data driven because they hired one analyst. And they won't become AI native because they hire one AI Engineer.

Technology is only one part of the equation, the harder challenge is redesigning how work happens. That means understanding where AI creates genuine value, rethinking workflows across departments, building governance that enables innovation, rather than restricting it, and creating systems that allow knowledge to be shared instead of trapped within teams.

This is where many organisations unintentionally create a bottleneck. The AI Engineer becomes the centre of every AI initiative - every question flows through them, every experiment depends on them, every new opportunity waits in their backlog. Instead of scaling AI across the organisation, they've centralised it around one individual.

The organisations making the fastest progress are taking a different approach. They're building internal capability while drawing on external expertise. Their AI Engineers focus on embedding AI into day-to-day operations and external partners bring experience gained across dozens of organisations, helping avoid common pitfalls, challenge assumptions and accelerate decisions that would otherwise take months to reach. It's not an either-or decision but a complementary partnership.

Internal teams understand the business better than anyone and external partners bring perspective the business can't develop in isolation. There's also a version of this that removes the trade-off entirely, and it's the model we run at &above: we hire the AI engineers, we manage them, and they work embedded inside your team on your workflows. You get the in-house build you wanted without the recruitment risk or the management load, and the capability transfers to your people as the work ships. It's how an embedded squad of ten ran inside Tesco for two and a half years and took creative compliance reviews from four weeks to days. Hiring an AI Engineer isn't the finish line. For most organisations it's the starting point, and you don't have to start it alone.