The crucial need to build AI literacy within the workforce was a key topic at a webinar Tuesday for the annual ASU+GSV Summit, led by Uplimit CEO and co-founder Julia Stiglitz, Workera CEO and founder Kian Katanforoosh, Degreed CEO and founder David Blake, and Karen Kocher, Microsoft’s global general manager of Workforce of the Future initiatives. The panel discussion, titled “Future-Proofing Your Organization: Adapting Skills for the AI Workplace,” focused on how and why tech leaders should integrate AI into their workplaces and prepare for a future where AI “challenges traditional workforce dynamics.”
According to Kocher, the use of AI tools like Copilot and ChatGPT is enabling workers to do their jobs more efficiently than ever before, whether those jobs are IT related or not. Because of this, she said, AI literacy will be a must in the 21st-century job market.
“If you’re an engineer, you need to have engineering savvy, but you also need to be able to make use of AI in order to make your work more efficient and more effective, just like you need to have good data-analysis skills so that you can really hone in on the right problem,” she said. “You will be able to thin out your workload [using tools like Microsoft’s Copilot] and focus on things that are more important — things that really require your unique skills — because you have a partner with you in the form of AI that can help you get your work done.”
Stiglitz said professional development resources for AI literacy will need to keep up with rapid advancements, and skill-building courses focusing on AI-related concepts today will likely need to look much different than before ChatGPT was first launched in 2022. Stiglitz added that professionals today need to understand the changing capabilities of AI in order to know how it might affect their jobs or industry.
“I think speed is now a requirement when it comes to learning officers rolling out learning programs within their companies. When we first started and we were talking to companies, [that process] was on like a 24-month cycle, where they’re spending six months or so figuring out what learning really needs to be done in the organization, and then another 18 months or longer in order to actually create the content. And 24 months ago, ChatGPT hadn’t launched. You think about how much the world has changed over these last 18 months,” she said. “If you are still working on that AI course from 24 months ago, it is no longer relevant, so you really need to think about new ways of creating content and creating learning experiences that are much more rapid. I think fortunately, AI also really lends itself well to that where you can begin to use AI for content production.”
Katanforoosh, who also works as a computer science instructor at Stanford, emphasized the need for AI literacy among “frontline workers that may see a benefit from a productivity perspective.” He said he’s noticed an increase in the number of non-major students taking computer science courses on AI skills and knowledge in recent years, as more and more professionals see the need for those skills to gain an edge in their jobs.
“Most of us are going to be users of AI. Some of us are going to be builders of AI. In a large enterprise, it’s probably 5 percent of people who are going to be builders of AI. I tend to think about AI skills across multiple groups or levels,” he said. “GenAI is becoming a durable skill, a horizontal skill across every discipline. In most universities now you have an AI course in every department.”
Blake said he thinks it’s essential for companies today to invest in building AI literacy in their workplaces, adding that the investment will pay off by increasing productivity dramatically.
“If you go learn about AI, it’s going to have a positive return. If your company invests in you learning AI, it’s going to have a positive return,” he said. “We should all be learning more, still.”
