Microsoft's AI Employees Hit Pay Dirt. Their Colleagues? Not So Much. Experts in deep learning and other AI fields are in short supply, so companies are competing fiercely.

^{This article originally appeared on Business Insider.}

Hundreds of Microsoft employees recently shared their compensation in an internal spreadsheet viewed by Business Insider. An analysis of this data shows how much workers in the tech giant's new AI organization are getting paid compared with their colleagues.

The AI group got started in March with Mustafa Suleyman, a cofounder of DeepMind, at the helm. It's responsible for consumer AI products such as Microsoft's Copilot AI chatbot and Bing search engine.

BI analyzed more than 500 submissions from people who identified themselves as Microsoft employees in the US. The spreadsheet includes salaries, performance-based raises, promotions, and bonus percentages.

The main takeaway: Microsoft is paying a lot more for artificial-intelligence talent. This is part of a race to build what could become the next major computing platform. Experts in deep learning and other AI fields are in short supply, so companies are competing fiercely, mostly through offering juicy salaries and hefty stock awards. Pricey acquihires are valuing some engineers at as much as $4 million a pop.

^{Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. Microsoft via BI}

Here are some highlights from the exclusive Microsoft data:

• Average compensation across all roles in the Microsoft AI group was about 37% more compared with the companywide average in the US, according to the information shared in the spreadsheet.
• Compensation among those who identified themselves as software engineers within Microsoft AI was about 48% more compared with all software-engineering roles across the company in the US.
• The average compensation among data scientists was about 11% more than the overall US average.

The chart below lays out averages for various Microsoft units, based on the internal spreadsheet obtained by BI. It also shows average compensation for all roles and for software engineers and data scientists, specifically. (The Microsoft AI group had fewer types of roles to compare with other organizations.)

^{Business Insider}

Microsoft employees typically share this information anonymously through spreadsheets to promote pay transparency, but they are not official Microsoft corporate documents. The spreadsheet viewed by BI includes only information employees voluntarily decided to share and isn't comprehensive.

A Microsoft spokesperson declined to comment.