As businesses are pressured to incorporate new AI tools, there is a dual challenge: effectively incorporate technology into their businesses and ensure the workforce can make the most of it.
The longstanding ways to assess employee skills and performance, as well as employment practices, have been overthrown and reimagined, according to business leaders who spoke at the Fortuns Brainstorm Tech Conference in Park City, Utah.
Technical skills are not the most important thing in the age of AI, contrary to what you might think. In fact, for many employers, technical skills are less important.
“This summer we saw a shift for the first time on our platform,” said Hayden Brown, CEO of Upwork, a freelancer online job marketplace. In the past, when Upwork asked employers about the most important skills they employ, the answers always included deep expertise in a particular technical field, Brown said. “This summer, for the first time, it's now a soft skill. It's a human skill. It's like problem-solving, judgment, creativity, taste.”
Jim Rowan, head of AI at Deloitte, the consulting firm that sponsored the Brainstorm discussion, said that “flowiness” of employees should not be the ultimate goal in itself. More importantly, intellectual curiosity about new tools and technologies.
And that's what you need to start at the top.
“We worked with the executive team to make sure that the top level of the organization and board is actually familiar with AI,” Rowan said. “It helps because they can communicate better with the team and see what they're doing.”
For Toni VanWinkle, Vice President of Digital Employee Experience at Adobe, it's important for employees at all levels of the organization to have “AHA moments” with AI technology. And the best way to bring it is for each employee to win the “first 10 hours.”
“You'll play with it,” says Van Winkle. “Sort your mailboxes, take notes in meetings, and create marketing campaigns. Through the initial process of personal exploration, you begin to understand the possibilities of the technology, she says.
The next steps are collaboration, discussion, and experimentation of colleagues within the same department or function.
“The whole mentality of this experiment learns quickly. That convulsion muscles can turn into something worthwhile when people talk openly,” says Van Winkle.
The importance of embracing experiments and cultivating them as value within the organization was actually reflected by Chief Information Officer Anthony Moisant.
“I'm thinking about the pilots we're running. Most of them fail, and I'm not at all embarrassed to say that,” says Moisant. It all comes down to what a particular organization is optimizing, and in fact, Moisant says, “We go fast-splitting muscles. Can we move faster?”
By encouraging lower stakes experiments with AI, businesses can gain valuable insights and experience that employees can quickly utilize when they are critical. “The only way to move faster is to make some bets early, without any actual long-term strategic ROI,” says Moisant.
Workday, AI Kathy Pham, emphasised that using new tools like AI can take a little longer than some people are used to seeing the overall picture of employee value and performance. “Part of the measurement is to better understand what the return is and what periods it takes over,” she said.
