> If so hiring managers are going to have to start looking at people who have an interest and have done some self-learning in the field.
Or candidates who have just started working with ML/AI are going to have to accept lower pay as their cost of changing specialisation. Or, likely, both.
I think there really aren't very many job positions that try to hire candidates who have just started working with ML/AI for a lower pay, everyone wants 'all or nothing', exclusively trying to hire people who already did that specialization change somewhere else; many are willing to pay for experience, but they aren't willing to accept lack of it for less pay.
This is true in general. The average software developer is doing the jobs of three or four people when I started fifteen years ago. Ops, dev, DBA, storage (s3, ebs, etc).
Or candidates who have just started working with ML/AI are going to have to accept lower pay as their cost of changing specialisation. Or, likely, both.