'The single most important' AI skill you need to learn, says MIT expert: Pick up 'the basics in 2 hours'

If you're adept at understanding and using artificial intelligence platforms, you're a highly valuable prospective employee for a lot of companies right now.

And if you want to know where to start, Anant Agarwal has some advice. "The single most important skill that everybody has pointed to is these two words: prompt engineering," Agarwal, the chief platform officer of multimillion-dollar education technology company 2U, tells CNBC Make It.

Prompt engineering is essentially the skill of refining and inputting text commands for generative AI programs like ChatGPT. The better at it you are, the more effectively you can prompt it into tasks like writing emails or reports, or even putting together PowerPoint presentations.

"How you ask for something [from a generative AI tool] is very critical," says Agarwal, the founder of online educational platform edX, which was acquired by 2U in 2021. He's also a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT and has served on the CNBC Technology Executive Council Advisory Board.

Say you want ChatGPT to analyze some data for you. You could tell it to "provide a data analysis report," but the chatbot could interpret that in an unintended fashion — numbers can be sliced in different ways — and deliver an answer that isn't very helpful.

A prompt engineer might try something more like this, according to a tutorial from AI education startup DataCamp: "As a data analyst, describe the process you would follow to analyze a dataset containing sales data for a retail store. Please include the steps to explore sales trends over time, identify top-selling products, and evaluate sales performance by region for the last quarter."

Prompt engineering can particularly help prevent generative AI's biggest current drawback: regular occurrences of mistakes, fabricated information and other errors, all known as "hallucinations."

A well-trained engineer "can stop [AI] from hallucinating by providing constraints," creating more accurate and efficient results, Agarwal says.

Prompt engineers are in demand: Some online freelancers charging up to $100 for five prompts, Make It reported last month. Full-time job openings can offer six-figure salaries, including one from Google-backed AI safety startup Anthropic that offers a salary range of up to $375,000 per year, as Bloomberg first reported.

Eighty-seven percent of U.S. CEOs and C-suite executives say they've struggled to find new employees with the necessary AI skills to be competitive in the future, according to a recent edX survey of 1,600 full-time workers, including 800 company leaders.

Nearly half of the executives surveyed said the skills that exist in their current workforce won't be relevant by 2025, the survey noted.

"Everyone needs to learn [prompt engineering], and you can learn the basics in two hours," says Agarwal.

He points out that edX offers online training courses and certification programs that teach AI skills, including free prompt engineering courses like "Advanced ChatGPT" and a class for beginners offered in partnership with Davidson College.

Other institutions and e-learning platforms, like Coursera, similarly offer online training courses for working with generative AI technology. So do companies like Google, Microsoft and LinkedIn.

"There's a solution staring everybody in the eye," Agarwal says. "That's the good news."

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