Companies are investing billions of dollars each year in generative AI tools aimed at enhancing the productivity of their staff. Nonetheless, a skill shortage remains across all levels, from top executives down to front-line workers.
“If you aren’t putting effort into skill enhancement and continuous education, I believe you will fall behind with your workforce,” stated Karalee Close, who leads global talent and organizational efforts at an IT service and management consultancy firm.
Accenture
, at
Dailyexe
Brainstorm AI Conference at ‘s in London on Tuesday.
According to Close, despite 97% of C-suite executives viewing artificial intelligence as a significant transformative opportunity, merely 13% have managed to generate actual business value from this technology. A scalability problem is becoming apparent since organizations are still uncertain about how their skill sets must adapt. As companies transition to applying generative AI tools beyond straightforward applications such as customer support, programming, and routine administrative duties towards more intricate areas including supply chain management and R&D, this challenge now poses an even larger obstacle for them.
“It comes down to whether you can cultivate the workforce appropriately,” Close stated.
AI skills gap
Some leaders believe that an inverse pyramid has emerged with AI: There’s great enthusiasm from the C-suite, but that level of interest starts to wane with middle managers, and it further deteriorates among early-career workers who still haven’t been shown exactly how AI will make them more productive.
“Spending more time on that will yield better results collectively,” said Chintan Patel, chief technology officer of Cisco’s Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) business.
Patel indicates that the digital knowledge disparity stretches well past AI, highlighting this fact.
research
released last year by British financial services company Lloyds Bank that found 52% of working-age adults in the U.K. lacked essential digital skills, ranging from effectively using social media, performing financial transactions, and understanding how to avoid online scams.
“If we fail to equip the current workforce with essential digital skills—keep in mind that 70% of the employees who will be part of the 2030 workforce are already working today—we’ll never manage to transition them into advanced AI roles,” Patel stated.
Every minute, five European companies are embracing AI technologies, as reported by a source.
study
from
Amazon
, technological advancements are progressing at a rate that significantly outpaces the proliferation of mobile phones around the year 2000. “The challenge we’re encountering is that even though the necessary technologies exist and they’re developing rapidly, the speed at which skill sets are evolving does not match this pace,” stated Tanuja Randery, who serves as the vice president and managing director of EMEA for Amazon Web Services.
Randery said that every conversation she has with CEOs features the same theme: They cannot find enough digital skills in the workforce. She recommends three fixes: a greater effort to educate students at universities on core digital skills, investments in reskilling programs for the current workforce, and getting leadership up to speed to fully grasp the implications of AI to their core businesses.
“Even though boards and CEOs are pulling for this, very few actually understand the technology and its implications,” Randery said.
Embracing change
Close from Accenture discussed her personal experience collaborating with the firm’s initiatives aimed at crafting 12 sector-focused AI assistants designed to assist employees across various duties such as managing clinical trials for pharmaceuticals, tackling problems related to machinery, and enabling marketing professionals and communicators to leverage data more effectively.
The takeaway for us was that tapping into the ingenuity and strength of top-tier marketers was essential,”Close stated. This involved training them and motivating them to engage large language models, carry out interactive dialogues with data, and adapt to new changes.”
Randery, citing a
2025 report
According to data from the World Economic Forum, by 2030, out of every 100 individuals in the global workforce, 59 will require reskilling due to technological advancements reshaping job responsibilities. Among them, 29 might gain new skills for their present positions, 19 may undergo training followed by relocation into different departments within the same firm, and an unfortunate 11 might lack appropriate reskilling opportunities, putting their jobs in jeopardy.
“There is absolutely a reason to believe that there is going to be a percentage of jobs that will go away,” Randery said. But, optimistically, she added, “If I go back to technology implementations over time, it only always results in augmentation.” She noted that AI coding assistant tools are taking away tedious tasks, but also spurring a new wave of creativity.
Close said that persistent research shows that humans, when combined with technologies like AI, are more effective at completing tasks than a human working on their own. Businesses need to reflect on their own purpose as a company: what’s their point of differentiation and how can humans be combined with technology, not pitted against each other.
“It’s less about who is good and who is going to be replaced,” Close said. “It’s more about what you can do differently with this technology.”
This story was originally featured on
Dailyexe
