If you're worried about the impact of AI on the IT profession and thinking about which direction to take your career, the smartest answer is to focus on honing the skills that will help you become the latest, and perhaps greatest, enterprise AI expert of all: the frontier engineer.

Steve Lucas, CEO of integration technology specialist Boomi, outlined how the frontier engineer -- someone with an advanced degree in data and neural networking -- will become the key professional who unlocks competitive advantage in the age of AI in a one-to-one chat with ZDNET at his firm's World Tour event in London, UK.

"Organizations will succeed when they have a deep understanding of how to optimize frontier models, how to use them, and someone has to think about those issues every day -- and a CIO needs that person, whoever she or he is, to be part of the organization," he said.

Lucas knows more about the likely trajectory of the technology industry than most. CEO of Boomi since December 2022 and formerly CEO of iCIMS and Marketo, as well as a holder of senior executive positions at Salesforce and SAP, he is now helping the integration specialist and its customers to navigate effective data use in an era of agents.

It's within this complex environment that Lucas said frontier engineers will bring clarity. However, IT professionals should be warned -- this high-profile role requires specialist qualifications and involves challenging responsibilities. For this reason, frontier engineers will be in massive demand as companies seek to stay ahead of their rivals.

"You don't need 100 of those people, but here's a question to ask every single CEO out there: 'Is there one human in your company, one, that understands how neural networks work?'" asked Lucas. "I would endeavor to say that for 95% of organizations, the answer would be unequivocally no -- and yet this is the fire that we are playing with."