In the generative AI (GenAI) era, helping employees develop new skills to do new jobs will take center stage for HR leaders. Roughly two-thirds of the chief human resource officers (CHROs), chief talent officers, chief people officers, and their direct reports recently polled by ServiceNow believe the technology will “radically change” how work gets done in the coming years. The World Economic Forum predicts that more than half of the global workforce will need to be upskilled or reskilled by 2025.
As a result, HR leaders and their bosses see upskilling and reskilling as crucial aspects of their jobs. Over 70% of CEOs surveyed by PwC are concerned about their companies’ lack of available skills. In its annual Skills Advantage Report, LinkedIn found that 90% of HR organizations defined upskilling and reskilling as their No. 1 priority for maintaining a workforce that will allow them to stay competitive.
Employees share this sense of urgency and expect to get help building the skills they need to adapt to a fast-changing world. More than 70% of employees polled by HRO Today in its annual Top Annual Concerns of CHROs survey said they would leave their job for an employer that invested more in their development; 86% said they would stay if they felt they were getting the training they needed.
Despite the initial concern about GenAI’s potential to put people out of work, many experts now believe the technology’s superpower is to augment and enhance humans’ ability to do their jobs, rather than to replace them. Of course, generative AI may lead to job loss in some roles in some industries. But far more important is how HR leaders can position their companies to use GenAI to gain a competitive advantage. That means finding more productive, profitable tasks for the one-third of people whose jobs will have been changed by the technology.
We asked four HR leaders to weigh in on how AI is fueling a revolution in the global skills, and to share a best practice on how to respond:
From my perspective, the key to succeeding with AI is a winning talent strategy. We need to help our employees know how to leverage generative AI responsibly in their roles and prepare them for the future of work. But this starts with charting a vision for generative AI that shows people that this new technology will not replace jobs, but it will change their experience. It will free employees from time-consuming, uninteresting tactical tasks and allow them to focus on uniquely human things such as creating, experimenting, and innovating.
To create this vision, we HR leaders must sharpen our own understanding of generative AI. Our research shows that many next-generation HR leaders have made moderate to significant progress using generative AI to generate content for HR purposes, such as creating job descriptions, generating communication, and screening job candidates. But we need to work closely with our technology teams to map strategic, predictive, and proactive solutions.
Jacqui Canney, Chief People Officer, ServiceNow
The first step is thinking about jobs in terms of the component tasks, projects, and responsibilities they contain. If AI is going to remove 20% of activities that make up current jobs, companies have to ask themselves: What is it that we will need to get done? What’s the 80% we now need to hire for or retrain for? What are the specific tasks, projects, skills, and capabilities that automation will replace, augment, or transform?
This is a big ask for CHROs. For many decades, maybe a century, we have looked for workers who presented themselves as 100% qualified for a job we expected to remain relatively stable for years. GenAI technology is moving so quickly that it will create a very fluid ecosystem of work that is in a perpetual state of deconstruction and reconstruction. Roles will constantly change.
It will require a very different way of looking at work. If the CEO or the board asks a CHRO, “What’s the future of work?” in my view, the only rational response is “We don’t know.” Today, that answer makes it sound like you’re abdicating responsibility. But HR needs to become more like software development and product development, where uncertainty is normal, even valued. Human resources will need to evolve this way so that we are constantly redesigning work by experimenting and testing in a systematic way to adapt to, and even harness, the uncertainty that comes with new technology.
John Boudreau, Senior Research Scientist at USC's Center for Effective Organizations
Last year, we published a report titled “Is HR already behind in the AI revolution?” The answer was—and is—yes. We found that HR is too often not involved in strategic conversations and governance decisions related to matters involving human resources and the future of work. That’s particularly disturbing because if there’s anything AI affects greatly, it’s the workforce. HR is the expert on workforce planning and strategy.
Part of the onus is on HR. Not enough CHROs are thinking about these issues deeply enough. To be included, HR leaders have to demonstrate expertise in AI, because right now there’s not a lot of confidence in HR’s expertise. But upskilling the workforce with GenAI tools has to begin with HR professionals, so they need to develop the knowledge and comfort level to do the job.
Kevin Oakes, CEO of the Institute for Corporate Productivity
There’s a world of change coming. We’re already seeing it with our Open Blue AI platform, which is allowing our technicians to be much more proactive and efficient with customers. Instead of waiting for something to go wrong, technicians can identify problems ahead of time. They can also help two or three customers in a day, instead of spending two days trying to problem-solve with one customer. This is because Open Blue acts as a virtual brain that lets us aggregate data on all the equipment we service in a building or set of buildings. We can do predictive analytics of the equipment itself and know what’s happening across all the buildings of each customer.
This AI platform is also helping lower the barrier to entry for our workers. If I had joined the company 10 years ago and wanted to become a master chiller technician, I’d have had to spend years in the field, learning how to do the job by trial and error. Now, I could describe a customer’s problem to Open Blue, and it will narrow down the list of possible causes to two or three. I’m not saying I could match the performance of a 10-year veteran in a year and a half, but it wouldn’t take me 10 years. It might take me two to four years. That’s how exponential the knowledge gains are.
I see all of this evolving very quickly. Everything we are doing today will likely be exponentially enhanced 24 months from now.
Marlon Sullivan, Chief Human Resources Officer, Johnson Controls
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Melanie Warner is a writer and editor based in Boulder, CO. A former staffer at Fortune and the New York Times, she is the author of Pandora's Lunchbox: How Processed Food Took over the American Meal, and The Magic Feather Effect: The Science of Alternative Medicine and the Surprising Power of Belief