Artificial intelligence (AI) represents a once-in-a-lifetime change management opportunity that might decide who wins and loses across every industry. As the AI era takes shape through digital transformation initiatives, executives and employees are contemplating the skills advancements they need to make to stay ahead of the competition. This is where AI upskilling and reskilling come into play.
Companies need to improve the AI literacy of employees to compete in a rapidly changing environment. Companies that create and enhance these AI competencies produce a competitive advantage over those companies that fail to upskill or reskill their employees for the era of AI.
However, respondents to a 2024 BCG study (link resides outside of IBM.com)1 demonstrate the difficulties of achieving success. While 89% of respondents said their workforce needs improved AI skills, only 6% said they had begun upskilling in “a meaningful way.”
An IBM® Institute for Business Value report found that more than 60% of executives say that generative AI will disrupt how their organization designs customer and employee experiences. Employees need to change to meet those needs. Many are turning to AI upskilling, the act of preparing the workforce with skills and education to empower them to use AI to do their jobs.
A 2024 Gallup poll (link resides outside ibm.com)2 found that nearly 25% of workers worry that their jobs can become obsolete because of AI, up from 15% in 2021. In the same study, over 70% of chief human resources officers (CHRO) predicted AI would replace jobs within the next 3 years.
The World Economic Forum estimated that automation will displace 85 million jobs by 2025, and 40% of core skills will change for workers in its Future of Jobs Report 2023 (link resides outside ibm.com)3. AI will usher in a new era of productivity and value, and business leaders in the C-suite should make employees part of that future.
Every organization is responsible for providing its workforce with the requisite skill sets and education to use AI in their daily jobs. CHROs, specifically, should lead the discussion about what skills technology automates and which ones remain mission-critical skills handled by employees.
The rise of AI is fundamentally remaking corporate strategy. Executives must enhance AI capabilities, such as generative AI tools, throughout the workforce. They must provide opportunities to develop employees’ skills as the AI takes on some of the previous tasks handled by humans.
Employees are interested in learning advanced technical skills that can harness the power of AI to make their jobs more efficient and their career paths more successful. Organizations have a vested interest in upskilling their employees to better use new technologies such as AI in their daily activities to enhance productivity and improve problem solving.
Upskilling (link resides outside ibm.com)4 and reskilling are separate but important components of an organization’s approach to talent development and skill building. The first, upskilling, is the process of improving employee skill sets through AI training and development programs. The goal of upskilling efforts is to minimize skill gaps and prepare employees for changes in their job roles or functions. An example of an upskilling program is customer care representatives learning how to use generative AI and chatbots to answer customer questions in real time with prompt engineering better.
Reskilling refers to learning an entire set of new skills to do a new job. For example, someone who works in data processing might need to embrace reskilling to learn web development or advanced data analytics.
Executives estimate about 40% of their workforce needs to reskill over the next 3 years, according to the IBM Institute for Business Value.
As with other initiatives, companies should pursue upskilling as a strategic imperative. Executives should start with their organizational goals before considering what tools and resources they need to prioritize.
Employees might be understandably nervous about AI’s impact on their careers and employment. Companies should communicate to employees about their approach to AI and reinforce how it helps those employees do their jobs. It can give employees a greater purpose and more responsibilities while minimizing the manual work that they would rather avoid.
Upskilling employees for the AI future also requires an upskilling of the learning and development practice. Businesses need to have a clear perspective of what tools they need and expertise to effectively educate their employees. Only then can they create the right learning and development programs.
Computer vision uses machine learning and neural networks to teach computers and systems to derive meaningful information from visual inputs. Employees should understand how computer vision mimics human vision and how it can be used to improve business functions.
Gen AI tools like watsonx™, ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Microsoft Co-Pilot and others are increasingly becoming a major part of company workflows. Generative AI can help knowledge workers in multiple industries learn quickly by synthesizing information and contemplating strategies and tactics. Also, companies are exploring the creation or licensing of these types of tools to train on their own data. Therefore, it might increasingly become a core part of an employee's job to learn how to use these tools, just as it was to learn the Internet and email decades ago.
Machine learning uses data and algorithms to enable AI to imitate the way humans learn, gradually improving its accuracy. Employees benefit from understanding the key components of ML, such as supervised and unsupervised learning, decision trees and neural networks, as it will be increasingly a part of data and analytics practices going forward. Embracing ML can help companies improve data analysis and become more data-driven in the future.
Natural language processing (NLP) is a subfield of computer science and artificial intelligence (AI) that uses machine learning to enable computers to understand and communicate with human language. NLP is a core component of chatbots and virtual assistants, so employees should understand how they operate to better use those tools.
RPA uses intelligent technologies to automate repetitive tasks usually handled by humans, such as extracting data, completing forms, moving files and more. Employees that understand how RPA can replace that effort and free up employees to focus on more meaningful, strategic tasks can help reimagine their jobs.
Like other groundbreaking technologies before it, the evolution of AI is creating opportunities for new industries, new jobs and new approaches to existing jobs. To prepare their people and businesses, organizations must help ensure that their employees are equipped with the skills for tomorrow without disrupting today’s business. This is where a range of upskilling use cases are critical for success.
Customer service is most CEOs’ top discipline for deploying generative AI, according to an IBM Institute for Business Value report. AI can handle some of the initial queries by customers, but customer service representatives (CSRs) also need to use the tools when issues get escalated to them. CSRs need to improve their ability to do prompt engineering and talk to customers while searching through AI-built databases.
Employees in finance have increasingly enhanced tools to help them make better investments on behalf of their clients. Nearly 70% of financial services leaders believe that at least half of their workforce requires upskilling in 2024. It requires not only learning how to use these new technologies but also feeling they can trust the results from AI technologies, even if they cannot completely understand them.
Hospitals and healthcare providers are incorporating AI technologies into their back offices and diagnostic care facilities. For example, healthcare companies are starting to use machine learning technologies to improve and speed up medical diagnoses (link resides outside ibm.com)5. Understanding what these technologies can and cannot do remains critical for healthcare professionals to make the right decisions.
Organizations are beginning to use AI in HR to process job applications and help find the right candidates. HR representatives need to learn how to use this technology to spot potential biases or other uncertainties, so they find valuable prospects.
Generative AI and other advanced technologies are creating massive opportunities for efficiency in web development. Developers can use it to convert 1 coding language into another. For example, applications can refactor COBOL code for mainframes into modular business service components.
Organizations can use AI technologies to enhance the AI learning experience itself.
Using generative AI chatbots and personalization can create more customized learning opportunities for each employee. It can create training programs that combine the foundational AI education any employee needs with specific instruction tailored to the learners’ jobs. As a result, the employee has a robust and tailored set of AI skills that helps them maximize their job capabilities.
Here’s a sample course load for an AI upskilling development program that IBM® offers:
Employees can improve their knowledge and expertise in AI tools by using AI applications while doing their jobs. Using generative AI tools, for instance, can help them answer the questions they have about certain processes while teaching them how to improve their prompts.
Organizations can input a ton of information about their employees’ performance and certifications and use machine learning to identify areas where they need more training. This approach is a more efficient way to identify gaps than through guesswork or asking employees where they need help.
AI can help large organizations better identify mentors and mentees based on various criteria, such as backgrounds, interests and what they want out of that relationship. An AI program that automatically matches mentors and mentees eliminates a laborious task and drives stronger connections across the organization.
Organizations can help employees identify where they want their careers to progress by using AI. It can suggest potential career paths and have them cycle through options until they get their ideal job.
While AI and other technologies can create opportunities for organizations to automate many processes, they still need employees to provide valuable context. Helping existing employees remain valuable to the organization serves a dual purpose of using their hard-won experience to improve decision-making.
One way to incorporate AI into employee work is using IBM role-based AI assistants with conversation-based interfaces that can support key consulting project roles and tasks.
Many AI technologies require humans to operate them or interpret the results. Organizations that try to deploy these technologies without worker assistance can either fail to maximize results or make incorrect decisions.
Employees are unlikely to stay at organizations that don’t prioritize the employee experience, which should now include AI skill development. One reason is that they expect employees to provide lasting skills for their jobs and careers. A second reason is that organizations that are not prioritizing AI are likely to fall behind their competitors.
AI is driving a massive change in web development. The age of AI ushers in a wave of generative AI code development that enables nondevelopers to build code as well. However, this can only happen if an organization invests in educating its employees on how to use it.
1 Five Must-Haves for Effective AI Upskilling, BCG, 08 October 2024.
2 No More Fear of Being Obsolete: Upskilling and the AI Revolution, Gallup, 2 February 2024.
3 2023 Future of Jobs Report, WEF, May 2023.
4 What is Upskilling and Reskilling?, Stanford University
5 Machine-Learning-Based Disease Diagnosis: A Comprehensive Review, National Library of Medicine, 10 March 2022
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