Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly transforming industries, and businesses are actively exploring its potential. However, a new study reveals a gap between AI adoption and understanding what skills are key to fully leveraging AI.
Valuing soft skills alongside hard skills
Our recent survey of UK IT leaders revealed that they expect AI to significantly impact workforces within the next three years. Yet, the focus remains heavily on technical expertise; hard skills remain the priority for leaders. Expertise in emerging technologies (27 percent) and data analysis and mining (23 percent) are cited as essential skills in preparing employees for a technology-driven future. While these are important in some roles, they’re not critical for the entire workforce in adopting AI.
Successful AI use involves being able to interrogate AI outputs and having the right tools in place to empower non-technical users to engage with it. However, soft skills like collaboration (17 percent), creativity (18 percent), and critical thinking (18 percent) fell behind hard skills as key traits for the workforce. Added to that, there was little acknowledgement by IT and data leaders of the need to familiarise employees with low and no-code applications (18 percent).
By failing to recognize how essential soft skills are for successfully scaling the use of AI, the benefits of automation and data-powered insights will be limited to those with the technical expertise to use it. That is, despite leaders acknowledging the ambition outside of the tech team to use AI, 39 percent said that their marketing and communications departments have expressed demand for harnessing AI in the short and long term.
Undervaluing soft skills can also leave the business vulnerable to unintentional misuse of AI. A huge 73 percent of business leaders admitted they have concerns over the accuracy of AI-produced answers in their organization. This makes the need for critical thinkers within the workforce, who can assess and scrutinize AI outputs, essential.
Creating a data-literate culture
For employees to fully participate in AI and data analytics, more must be done to ensure the right foundation skills are in place. Not every employee needs to become a data scientist for AI to have widespread benefits in an organization. Instead, ongoing investment in people is needed to foster a data and analytics-centric culture, including the reappreciation of soft skills. This can begin in the hiring process, but there should also be constant upskilling and training opportunities for existing employees, ensuring every team member understands the importance of data and feels empowered to contribute.
Data literacy is essential for successfully implementing AI, and softer skills are integral. Creativity allows employees to identify more innovative ways to use data. Critical thinking is essential in evaluating AI answers to overcome hallucinations and misinformation so that employees and organizations can avoid ethical and legal issues. Collaboration skills enable team members to work with AI with empathy and more nuanced ideas while technology takes care of manual and repetitive tasks.
Ensuring all employees are developing these skills through training opportunities and combining this with access to and learning on low and no-code applications offers the benefits of data analytics to non-technical staff and fosters a culture of creative, analytics-supported decision-making throughout an entire organization.
The rise of the CAIO and evolving AI-focused roles
Ensuring the upskilling of the workforce and the harmonious rollout of AI also requires a shift in workforce structure. Sixty-one percent of business leaders anticipate the emergence of the Chief AI Officer (CAIO) role to fill this need. The CAIO title is in its early days, with just over 400 people on LinkedIn holding it. Still, it will be critical to have a holistic approach to AI strategy that collaborates with business units from IT and compliance to HR and People teams.
CAIO is just one of the emerging roles brought about by the advent of AI as businesses switch from exploration mode to full-scale rollout. Currently, AI application engineers (37 percent), responsible for designing and developing AI-powered models, followed by AI research scientists (33 percent), who drive innovation through the research and development of AI systems, are the most pressing priority for leaders. Comparatively, just 17 percent said that they are urgently looking to hire AI whisperers and prompt engineers tasked with communicating with and guiding AI systems, but over half (56 percent) expect these roles to be necessary.
As well as these new opportunities, HR departments must be aware of the technical skills that AI will take over and how this will impact job roles. Repetitive coding, database administration and AI/ML development are among the skills that AI can do and this will mean that certain roles within businesses will evolve.
Final thoughts
For businesses to successfully roll out AI and unlock actual value, leaders need to focus on shaping their future workforce now or risk getting left behind in the seismic shift of skills required in the intelligence era. Nurturing skills that allow everyone to look at business problems through an analytical lens and developing the abilities of those in AI-specific roles through constant training and upskilling is key to building the AI-ready workforce of the future.
