Preparing for an AI-empowered workforce

Upskilling and reskilling for artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are being touted as 2025 business imperatives.

The catch is that many organizations have yet to get a firm grasp on how they should be using AI and ML, which makes it difficult to define training priorities. A further complication is resistance to change.

“If you’re not thinking about resistance from the start, you’re not approaching it seriously,” says author, speaker, and advisor Greg Satell, a contributor to the book Reskilling and Upskilling: The Insights You Need from Harvard Business Review, which was published in March 2024. “One of the first things we do with an organization working on the change initiative is walk them through a resistance inventory.”

He adds, “Shifts in knowledge and attitudes don’t necessarily result in shifts in practice. People adopt the changes they see working around them, not the ones that they just hear about.” With that in mind, he advises starting with small projects that can be scaled.

Where to begin? Public- and private-sector resources can help organizations understand the landscape and which areas of skills development are most pressing today.

Federal government

In late January 2025, the National Artificial Intelligence Advisory Committee submitted a draft report to the White House with its recommendations regarding the current state of United States’ competitiveness and leadership in AI. The report’s focus areas include AI and the workforce; AI awareness and literacy; AI in science; and AI to empower small businesses, entrepreneurs, and nonprofits.

More specifically, the report’s recommendations include the scope and scale of U.S. investments in AI research and development in the international context; issues related to AI and the U.S. workforce; and opportunities for international cooperation on AI research activities, standards development, and the compatibility of international regulations. Read the full report at https://bit.ly/NAIAC-Insights-on-AI.

State governments

The National Conference of State Legislatures published a database of 2024 AI legislative initiatives that is searchable by state. View the database at https://bit.ly/NCSL-AI-legislation-by-state.

Legislative activity included in the database was not limited to states regarded as centers of AI/ML innovation. For example, Utah passed the Artificial Intelligence Policy Act, the first of its kind in the United States. It “establishes liability for use of artificial intelligence (AI) that violates consumer protection laws if not properly disclosed; creates the Office of Artificial Intelligence Policy (office) and a regulatory AI analysis program”; and “requires disclosure when an individual interacts with AI in a regulated occupation.” The full text of the Act is at https://le.utah.gov/~2024/bills/static/SB0149.html.

The global perspective

Companies and research institutes that do business with entities in Europe should keep abreast of the regulatory environment there. In May 2022, the European Parliament published the study “AI and digital tools in workplace management and evaluation: An assessment of the EU’s legal framework.” Other documents in this vein published over the years include

• What if AI regulation promoted innovation?
• What if AI could help us become ‘greener’?
• What if Europe championed new AI hardware?

A final resource to highlight is the study “Regulating disinformation with artificial intelligence,” which touches on emerging threats to organizations’ reputation management.

Compliance and ethics concerns

The International Compliance Association published the report “AI and ethics: Why does it matter for compliance?” Topics in the report include

• Ethical and legal challenges to AI;
• AI, bias, and threats to fairness;
• Issues surrounding accountability and privacy; and
• Where the AI and ethics agenda is headed.

The International Organization for Standardization examines such issues as principles of responsible AI, promoting responsible AI practices, and keeping up with AI best practices in the article “Building a responsible AI: How to manage the AI ethics debate.”

The World Economic Forum’s article “Why corporate integrity is key to shaping the use of AI” notes that AI regulatory landscape “is complex and inconsistent, with approaches ranging from voluntary industry codes of conduct to binding risk-based regulations at the national or supra-national level…in the United States alone, while 73% of C-suite executives believe that ethical AI guidelines are important, only 6% have developed them.” It encourages the adoption of “non-binding codes of corporate conduct, promoted by initiatives like the G7 Hiroshima Process” to “help guide global business approaches to AI deployment.”

Reskilling and upskilling resources

Stanford University publishes an annual AI Index report. The seventh edition, published in 2024, “introduces new estimates on AI training costs, detailed analyses of the responsible AI landscape, and an entirely new chapter dedicated to AI’s impact on science and medicine.”

The IBM blog post “Upskilling and reskilling for talent transformation in the era of AI” looks at how to approach workforce training.

In the report “Five must-haves for effective AI upskilling,” Boston Consulting Group acknowledges that “upskilling is also a major bottleneck for companies that want to scale AI and GenAI across their organizations” and looks at “which approach to AI upskilling yields the biggest return on the twin investments of time and resources.”

In the report “Future of work,” the Advanced Robotics for Manufacturing Institute details how “advanced technologies, chiefly robotics, automation, and AI, are changing the nature of manufacturing careers and the actions needed to prepare the U.S. manufacturing workforce for these changes.”

In the Oracle article “Upskilling & reskilling in the era of AI,” content strategist Natalie Gagliordi writes, “With AI, businesses can prepare for future skill requirements and emerging trends in the job market by proactively identifying skills gaps and designing upskilling and reskilling programs that align with workforce needs.”

For a deeper dive

Courses and certificate programs in AI are available from, among others, the following institutions:

• American Management Association
• Berkeley Executive Education
• Cornell University
• Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• The University of Texas at Austin

Further resources are available from the Association of Data Scientists, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, and the International Society of Automation.