Reward Engineering: An Emerging Skill for AI Engineers

Introduction In their comprehensive report " AI Predictions for 2026 ," Richard Socher (one of the world's most-cited NLP researchers and CEO of You.com) and Bryan McCann (CTO of You.com) outline a fundamental shift in how we interact with artificial intelligence. Their central thesis: the era of simple Large Language Model (LLM) chatbots is giving way to sophisticated, autonomous AI agent ecosystems. This transformation represents a shift from "Chat-Engines" (systems you converse with) to "Do-Engines" (systems that autonomously complete tasks for you). To enable this shift, Socher and McCann predict the emergence of a new specialization: the Reward Engineer —a professional who designs the mathematical and logical objective functions that define success for AI agents. Whether or not "Reward Engineer" becomes an official job title in 2026, the underlying skill of reward engineering is rapidly becoming essential for any AI engineer working with autonomous systems. What is Reward Engineer