The proliferation of generative artificial intelligence (gen AI) innovations necessitates a new approach to employee attraction, engagement, and retention. Our survey finds that compared to late adopters, companies adopting gen AI earlier place greater emphasis on talent development, with two-thirds already having a strategic approach to address their future talent and skill requirements.
Organizations should think about a breadth of gen AI capability needs—from broad fluency supporting business goals, to deep technical and domain-specific capabilities—as well as the speed and scale at which they should be developed. However, organizations are struggling to make the jump from gen AI fundamentals and compliance training to practical, outcome-driven skill building.
What to consider
To realize this opportunity, organizations should take a collaborative, scaled approach to upskilling and reskilling. Reimagining their learning and development (L&D) can help organizations meet the demands of gen AI and elevate L&D functions to be stronger strategic partners for business leaders. Here are three considerations:
- Goals before roles. While tempting to rush into building gen AI literacy across all roles at once, start with business outcomes and how gen AI investments can enable or accelerate them instead. Define the skills required to deliver these outcomes and identify groups within the organization that need to build those skills. This is important, as gen AI has led to more rapid reshaping and creation of roles; skills—especially durable ones—are a clearer, longer-lasting currency.
- Human-centered L&D. Many transformations fail due to people and culture challenges. With gen AI, both the nature of work and required skills will continuously be reshaped, and some employees may experience skilling efforts as a threat to their well-established professional identities. Leading with an empathetic, human-centered approach, L&D can transform initial fear into curiosity, fostering mindsets of opportunity and continuous learning.
- Corporate learning, reimagined. Next-generation skilling will look fundamentally different. Gen AI technology makes the ultimate dream of learning possible—at scale, personalized, in the workflow, and when it matters. This will require tighter collaboration across the HR function, stronger business integration to embed learning experiences into working environments, and a refreshed approach to the L&D technology ecosystem.
Where to start
Below are four identified high-level goals to focus on, including associated priority skills and employee groups likely in need of skilling efforts:
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Lead and drive value: Prioritize skills to inspire the “art of the possible from gen AI.” Make informed decisions, including risk and ethics considerations, on investments to accelerate and enhance value creation. Role model behaviors to encourage innovation and experimentation.
Target groups include the C-suite, who set transformation vision and strategy; domain and functional leaders, accountable to delivering transformation outcomes; and change agents, who influence solution adoption and scaling.
Effective formats include highly immersive moments embedded along a longer journey (e.g., “go and sees” to organizations on similar paths), ideally linked to strategy development and execution.
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Build and deploy models: Prioritize skills to design, develop, test, and securely deploy AI models in service of business use cases with a strong emphasis on collaboration and risk management.
Target groups include cross-functional teams of tech talent, such as data scientists, data and AI engineers, and product leaders.
Formats can include team-based coaching to help accelerate team effectiveness as well as deeper skill-building learning journeys and technical certifications.
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Enable value in specific domains: Prioritize skills to identify where gen AI can improve outcomes, reinvent workflows and approaches, and operationalize new ways of working in specific domains or functional areas.
Target groups include domain and functional experts, who shape the development and deployment of gen AI solutions to enable relevant use cases, and experts who provide guidance on the governance, legal, risk management, talent, and operational angles of gen AI.
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Augment the day-to-day: Prioritize skills to integrate gen AI tools responsibly into daily tasks and continuous learning, ranging from risk, security, data literacy, and ethics protocols to critical durable, human-oriented skills that can’t be augmented as easily (e.g., empathy, critical thinking, resilience).
Target groups include frontline workforces who may leverage new gen AI tools specifically tailored to their needs (e.g., AI-generated scripts for customer agents), employees who make use of a broader set of gen AI tools to enhance tasks, as well as the line managers with visibility into their daily work.
Formats must be scalable and personalized—fortunately, gen AI is revolutionizing effective and efficient in-the-flow-of-work learning (e.g., AI co-pilots as coaches).
Organizations taking a more strategic approach to address the people aspect of gen AI are poised to capture the full value of the technology. When L&D and business leaders join forces to seed and lead a “skill surge,” they can fully harness the business impact of gen AI and foster a culture of courageous and continuous growth, supporting all employees in achieving their goals.