Employees don’t have to finish last in AI race

“In terms of education, [we] have a baseline set across the whole company, so everyone has a shared understanding of the technology,” says Matt Baker, senior vice president of AI strategy at Dell, who works closely with Boudreau. “And those who want to learn more, or need to learn more to do their job, we’re going to do that in a structured fashion.” 

Similar efforts have been underway at consumer-products giant Colgate-Palmolive, where “the appetite is insatiable,” says Kli Pappas, global head of AI and senior director.

Four out of five workers want to learn more about how to use AI within their profession, according to a survey conducted by LinkedIn, and major employers are putting more effort into AI upskilling. Amazon’s “AI Ready” commitment aims to provide free AI skills training to 2 million workers globally by 2025. More recently, Cisco led an initiative alongside Accenture, Google, IBM, and several other firms to study the impact of AI on dozens of information and communication technology jobs and eventually provide actionable training insights for workers and business leaders.

Colgate-Palmolive began by offering a 20-minute training session that was shared across the company, covering basics including defining generative AI, outlining company policies on what to use and not use, and how to responsibly handle data. An AI hub was launched for all employees to safely interact with AI models. 

But since then, the company has rolled out a series of optional hourly courses, which are more detailed and cover AI ethics, prompt engineering, and how to identify good business questions to ask conversational models. 

“Technology is changing so quickly, that the safest bet an organization can make is in the skills of their people,” says Pappas. “We are constantly evolving the training.”

Dell started its generative AI educational journey by offering details about policies and getting workers up to speed on the basics of some tools. In mid-2023, following a reorganization of some senior talent to more directly focus on AI, it began to develop a core AI curriculum for the company. 

Dell is currently rolling out AI fundamentals coursework that all employees are asked to enroll in, covering how to use AI safely and responsibly and better understand how generative AI can improve workflows. There’s also coursework that ranges from introductory classes for nontechnical roles to more complex learning for those in data science roles. 

At pharmaceuticals giant Johnson & Johnson, approximately 20,000 workers have taken a generative AI introductory training course, a requirement for those who want to leverage the technology. Employees can then connect with mentors and explore opportunities to apply AI tools.

“We created secure generative AI environments across the company, with different [large language models] and different stacks,” says Jim Swanson, chief information officer at J&J. 

Jennifer Hartsock says that ever since she joined Cargill in 2022 as chief information and digital officer, part of her focus has been upskilling the current workforce, hiring for the necessary skill sets, and partnering with universities to tap talent across the 70 countries in which the company operates. 

“Certainly generative AI is of interest, as well as other technology and data skills that we need to be able to serve our customers,” says Hartsock.

Rajeev Rajan, chief technology officer at software maker Atlassian, says throughout his career at tech giants like Microsoft and Meta, there have been moments when employers have to upskill their workforce to meet the new demands from innovation, including the mobile revolution and the early days of the internet. 

“The difference with AI is that every engineer, and actually every human being, is going to have to use AI or the job you are doing is going to get redundant or not as efficient,” says Rajan. 

Engineers in particular will need to lean into AI because new tools can automatically write code and change the flow of work in other profound ways. To that end, Atlassian created an AI school modeled after a course that’s held at Stanford University. Engineers can complete the sessions in just 16 weeks if they commit to two to three hours of learning each week. 

“We fundamentally believe that any engineer that we have in the company can learn,” says Rajan. He hopes that all 6,000 engineers at Atlassian will graduate from the school.

While large tech employers—Google, Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft among them—have the desirable innovative allure and budgets to attract top talent, most employers will look inward for the development of their AI skills, says Kian Katanforoosh, CEO of upskilling platform Workera.

“Outside of tech, you have a ton of people trying to acquire AI skills rapidly, and that pushes companies to upskill rather than hire,” says Katanforoosh. “Because AI touches productivity, it is helpful to many people in your organization.”

Colgate-Palmolive and Dell each say they’ll hire some talent externally, but the goal is to cultivate AI skills among the current employee base. “We will hire strategically for what I would say is more rarefied data science talent, but for the most part, I think that your average app developer and data scientist can easily upskill to be very effective with this technology,” says Dell’s Baker.

Pappas shares a similar sentiment. “I only need a small handful of people externally to bring in very specific skills,” he says. “And really what I need is people to help be connectors, and a lot of the talent is sourced internally.”

Cybersecurity provider Fortra estimates that as many as 4 million cybersecurity jobs are unfilled globally. As AI-related threats grow more potent, more AI literacy will be needed among those individuals who work in the data privacy industry. 

“Everyone wants to work for Google and some of those cool places in the world,” says Antonio Sanchez, principal cybersecurity evangelist at Fortra. “But every organization needs highly skilled people.”