How Many Data & AI Professionals Should an Organisation Have?

date posted: 2026-Oct-28, last edit date: 2026-Oct-28

This is a question I kept coming back to in my previous role. How many people should my department have? And more broadly, how many data professionals should we have across the bank?

At one point, I launched a public survey to get a better idea of what other organisations were doing. I didn’t get many responses, though, and it didn’t really answer the question.

It came up again in a recent interview when I was asked about the size of my team at the bank. That brought me back to the same question: how do we know what size is appropriate?

I also remembered a passage in Thomas Redman’s book Getting in Front on Data, where he offers an approach to thinking about staffing for data management. So I decided to explore the question more systematically, starting with Kuwait’s banks.

Working with ChatGPT and publicly available information, I mapped 278 Data & AI professionals across nine Kuwaiti banks. It’s an incomplete picture, but hopefully a useful starting point.