Reskilling for the Intelligent Age / Davos 2025

Summary

This panel discussion focused on the “reskilling revolution” and its importance in addressing the rapidly changing nature of work. The panelists, including CEOs and a government minister, explored the skills needed for the future workforce and strategies for reskilling at scale. They emphasized the growing importance of AI and how it’s reshaping job roles, with a consensus that uniquely human skills like critical thinking, agility, and the ability to learn are becoming increasingly valuable.

The discussion highlighted the need to reimagine jobs as flexible sets of tasks and to focus on teaching people how to learn rather than just accumulating knowledge. Panelists shared various approaches to reskilling, including internal company programs, public-private partnerships, and digital platforms for skill matching. They stressed the importance of leadership in modeling continuous learning and adapting to new technologies.

Concerns were raised about ensuring AI doesn’t exacerbate existing inequalities, with suggestions to diversify AI datasets and improve AI readiness across all segments of society. The panel also touched on the challenges of skills-based hiring and the potential for AI to make workers more productive earlier in their careers.

The discussion concluded with reflections on personal reskilling goals and the broader societal implications of the AI revolution. Panelists agreed on the need for a collaborative approach involving businesses, governments, and educational institutions to create more inclusive pathways to good jobs and to ensure that reskilling benefits all communities.

Keypoints

Major discussion points:

– The need to reskill workforces for rapidly changing jobs and technologies, especially AI

– The importance of developing “learning to learn” skills and adaptability, not just technical skills

– Challenges in reskilling at scale and making it accessible to diverse populations

– The role of companies, governments, and public-private partnerships in reskilling efforts

– Personal reskilling goals and experiences of leaders

Overall purpose/goal:

The discussion aimed to explore the challenges and opportunities of the “reskilling revolution” – a global effort to retrain workers for the rapidly changing job market, especially given the rise of AI and automation. The panelists shared insights on effective reskilling approaches and discussed how to make these efforts more inclusive and impactful.

Tone:

The overall tone was thoughtful and constructive, with panelists building on each other’s ideas. There was a sense of urgency about the need for reskilling, balanced with optimism about the potential for positive change. The tone became more personal and reflective towards the end as panelists discussed their own reskilling goals and experiences.

Speakers

– Adam Grant: Organizational Psychologist at Wharton

– Omar Abbosh: CEO of Pearson

– Vimal Kapur: CEO of Honeywell

– Joe Ucuzoglu: Global CEO of Deloitte

– Claudia Azevedo: CEO of Sonae (Portuguese multi-business company)

– Jayant Chaudhary: Minister for Skills and School Education, India

Additional speakers:

– Audience members: Asked questions during Q&A session

The “Reskilling Revolution” Panel Discussion

Introduction:

This panel discussion, featuring prominent CEOs and a government minister, explored the critical topic of the “reskilling revolution” and its importance in addressing the rapidly changing nature of work. The conversation centered on the skills needed for the future workforce, strategies for reskilling at scale, and the growing impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on job roles and skill requirements.

Panelists:

– Vimal Kapur, CEO of Honeywell

– Joe Ucuzoglu, Global CEO of Deloitte

– Jayant Chaudhary, Minister for Skills and School Education in India

– Omar Abbosh, CEO of Pearson

– Claudia Azevedo, CEO of Sonae

– Adam Grant, Organizational Psychologist and Professor at Wharton

Key Themes and Discussion Points:

1. Skills for the Future Workforce:

The panelists agreed that the rise of AI is reshaping job roles and skill requirements. There was a consensus that uniquely human skills are becoming increasingly valuable:

– Vimal Kapur emphasized AI as an enabler to solve skills shortages, stating, “AI is not replacing jobs, it’s augmenting jobs.”

– Joe Ucuzoglu argued that leadership and critical thinking skills are more challenging to develop than technical skills.

– Jayant Chaudhary highlighted the need for both specialists and generalists who can connect domains.

– Omar Abbosh stressed the importance of “learning to learn” as a critical skill.

– Claudia Azevedo emphasized the need for empathy and leadership skills at all levels of an organization.

Adam Grant and Joe Ucuzoglu noted AI’s potential to surpass humans in areas previously thought to be uniquely human, such as empathy and creativity. This challenges traditional assumptions about the division of labor between humans and AI.

2. Reskilling Approaches and Challenges:

The panel explored various approaches to reskilling and the challenges associated with implementing these at scale:

– Jayant Chaudhary advocated for breaking down jobs into tasks and skills for more flexible learning, mentioning India’s efforts in this area.

– Adam Grant emphasized giving employees autonomy to evolve their jobs and develop skills, stating, “Let’s give people the freedom to craft their jobs.”

– Joe Ucuzoglu stressed the importance of leadership modeling reskilling behaviors: “Leaders need to be role models in continuous learning.”

– Vimal Kapur highlighted the need for immersive learning experiences with AI tools, citing examples from Honeywell’s operations.

– Claudia Azevedo suggested reframing reskilling as aspirational rather than remedial.

3. AI’s Impact on Skills and Jobs:

The discussion delved into the profound impact of AI on the future of work:

– Vimal Kapur stressed the need to reimagine products and jobs with AI capabilities, giving examples from the aviation and building management industries.

– Omar Abbosh saw an opportunity for AI to help address skills gaps for a broader population.

– Joe Ucuzoglu expressed concern about AI exacerbating societal divides and emphasized the need for trustworthy AI.

– Jayant Chaudhary emphasized the importance of diverse data sets and open-source approaches for AI development.

4. Collaboration between Education, Industry, and Government:

The panel highlighted the need for a collaborative approach to address the reskilling challenge:

– Claudia Azevedo advocated for public-private partnerships, mentioning Portugal’s New Career Network as an example.

– Jayant Chaudhary discussed India’s efforts, including the Apprenticeship Act and PM Internship Program.

– Vimal Kapur emphasized the need for companies to create jobs and provide internship opportunities.

– Adam Grant proposed using AI assignments to teach collaboration with AI tools in educational settings.

5. Skills-Based Hiring and Digital Marketplaces:

The panel discussed the shift towards skills-based hiring and the role of digital platforms:

– Adam Grant and Omar Abbosh highlighted the growing importance of skills over traditional credentials in hiring decisions.

– Claudia Azevedo described Portugal’s New Career Network, a digital marketplace connecting job seekers with opportunities based on skills.

– Jayant Chaudhary mentioned India’s Skill India Digital Hub, which aims to match skilled workers with job opportunities.

6. Personal Reskilling Goals for 2025:

Towards the end of the discussion, panelists shared their personal reskilling goals:

– Vimal Kapur committed to spending more time with customers to understand their evolving needs.

– Joe Ucuzoglu planned to deepen his understanding of AI’s impact on various industries.

– Jayant Chaudhary aimed to learn more about AI and its applications in education.

– Omar Abbosh set a goal to improve his skills in using AI tools for content creation and analysis.

– Claudia Azevedo committed to learning more about AI and its potential applications in retail.

– Adam Grant suggested the idea of “returnships” as a reskilling opportunity for those re-entering the workforce.

Key Takeaways and Action Items:

1. Reskilling is critical to address skills gaps and enable business transformation, economic growth, and opportunity.

2. AI is both disrupting jobs and enabling new ways to reskill workers.

3. Leadership, critical thinking, and learning agility are becoming more important than technical skills alone.

4. Collaboration between industry, education, and government is needed to align skills training with future needs.

5. Reskilling efforts need to be inclusive and address potential societal divides.

The panel suggested several action items:

– Leaders should personally engage with AI tools to understand their potential.

– Companies should provide more internship and apprenticeship opportunities, including for non-traditional candidates.

– Educational institutions should incorporate AI tools into assignments rather than banning them.

– Organizations should focus on breaking down jobs into tasks and skills to enable more flexible learning and job crafting.

Conclusion:

The discussion highlighted the urgent need for a collaborative approach to reskilling, involving businesses, governments, and educational institutions. The panelists agreed on the transformative potential of AI in addressing skills gaps, the critical importance of leadership and soft skills, and the need for continuous learning and adaptability. As the world grapples with the rapid pace of technological change, the insights from this panel provide valuable guidance for leaders in business, education, and government on how to navigate the reskilling revolution and prepare workforces for the future of work.

Adam Grant: I think we might have a panel. Welcome everyone. I’m Adam Grant, Organizational Psychologist at Wharton. Thrilled to welcome you all to talk about the reskilling revolution. Our panelists are going to introduce themselves in a second, but just to set the stage a little bit, this is the five-year anniversary of the reskilling revolution. The goal was to actually reskill a billion people with better education, training, knowledge, expertise, and so far we’re already on track to reach 716 million people, so I think it’s safe to say that the billion is going to be hit. We know the world is changing rapidly. Everything we know pretty much about work is turning upside down, and I think we have both an opportunity and a responsibility to make sure that people are equipped for that transformation. We have a great group of leaders here to help us think that through. I’m going to ask them to introduce themselves. I think Omar, you’re up first. Yeah, ABB. Omar Abbosh, CEO of Pearson. Hello, everyone. Joe Ucuzoglu, Global CEO of Deloitte. Wonderful to be here. Vimal Kapur, good afternoon. I’m CEO of Honeywell. Hi, my name is Claudia Azevedo. I’m CEO of a Portuguese-based multi-business company called Sonai. Hi, I’m Jayant Chaudhary from India, Minister for Skills and School Education. So let’s start with the skills that actually need to be rethought and retaught. What are the core skills that need to be learned that aren’t in play today?

Vimal Kapur: Anyone who wants to continue. I can kick it off, you know. I would say we represent the industrial world. Our product services go into different industrial segment, aerospace, buildings, energy sector, and I think what skills we don’t have or our customers don’t have is to run operations, maintain equipment, shortage of pilots. So it was nice to talk to come to a point that it’s becoming a tipping point of lack of revenue or revenue risk because these skills, people are retiring. and the new skills acquired are not rapidly pacing up, so we really have to solve this issue, and I really see AI as a great enabler. To me, this is a great gift, which is likely to solve this very compelling problem ahead of us.

Joe Ucuzoglu: Well, maybe to build on that, I mean, this is a topic near and dear to us at Deloitte. We have nearly 500,000 people around the world. That’s the core of our value proposition. Clearly, there’s a technical element with the rapid proliferation of new technologies, and so we have academies set up relative to skill sets around engineering, data, cyber, cloud, but what we found is that’s actually the easy part. The more challenging dimension is the leadership aspect of what it takes to thrive in an environment that’s this rapidly changing, and the reality is we need people who are agile. We need people who are critical thinkers, and we feel like we’re fighting a bit of a battle against societal trends right now because people are sort of more polarized. They’re living in echo chambers. They’re dug into their viewpoint. We want to create the opposite in terms of an optimal consultant, an optimal professional advisor, is someone who’s open to different ideas, who’s willing to take in information even if it might not agree with their predisposed point of view, so it’s the leadership skills that are actually more challenging to develop than the technical know-how.

Jayant Chaudhary: We need more politicians.

Adam Grant: I don’t think anyone would agree with that one.

Jayant Chaudhary: Well, I’m happy where I am, but I think what he’s saying points to the depth of domain knowledge which industry is to anchor for. Scale and depth, there’s something that we hear constantly, constant refrain that we want scale and depth of skill before we put the hard dollars in and start investing, but it seems to me like we need more generalists also who can talk to the engineers and technicians and understand the market. and create a product. If you wanna create a product for now and for the future, you may not need to know how to code. So I think it’s a dynamism that is now the currency of today, which I think all corporations are asking for. And we just have to see whether our traditional legacy educational systems are prepared to actually churn that product out.

Adam Grant: I do think that speaks to a real challenge we’re facing from a re-skilling perspective, which is so much of the reliance we’re doing on AI is dependent on assuming that the past is going to mirror the future. We can only train AI on data from before, which may or may not be diagnostic of where we’re headed. And I think what that means for a lot of us is we can’t anymore put a premium on just being sort of fact collectors, people who accumulate knowledge. We actually need to be dot connectors, people who synthesize patterns and recognize changes that maybe AI is behind on. Is anybody working on this? Are you re-skilling your workforces or your people around pattern recognition?

Vimal Kapur: No, I think I’m glad you bring it up because there’s a lot of discussion of agentic AI. And I think if you unpeel that, agents is a great way to assist human to get something better. But when I look at in context of our business, human intervention or human judgment is a final say at the end of it. So if agents are doing a lot of repetitive work, humans can be spared to make more judgment or higher, deeper judgment. Because if you’re consumed in a lot of repetitive tasks, you’re consumed at that point of time. So I see the re-skilling also to reimagine the jobs, because as new tools are coming, the jobs are getting redefined, more leadership skills are required, more decision making is required, more judgment is required. And it’s less about doing things which are, I wouldn’t say have been done many times before, which are repetitive. And that’s evolution, which we all have to observe and make a change there.

Jayant Chaudhary: But isn’t AI already doing creative tasks that we assume? the human mind is only capable of doing that.

Omar Abbosh: Yeah, I mean, I totally, I mean, the minute you say dot connecting, Adam, I immediately think of AI, actually. AI is amazingly brilliant at pattern recognition. So actually, one of the areas that’s more surprising, if you look at things like the O3 model from OpenAI more recently, is actually how you can augment deep, deep scientific researchers. So you know, in human science, by the time you become a postdoc, you’re down to an incredibly narrow domain of depth of specialization. So you actually can’t see what’s happening in the other, you know, even closely related domains, the AI can, you know, if we train it to do that. So actually, turning AIs into collaborators as research assistants can be incredibly powerful for us. But that does require us to learn a whole bunch of new skills. And imagine, you know, to the agentic comment that Vimal just made, how is a manager gonna divide tasks between the human workers and the digital workers? Today, most of the AI that we think about is a collaborative tool for an individual contributor. It’s not really yet really been thought through how do you apply it to a team? And how do you apply, how do you chunk up the work across teams? So I think we’re gonna see a ton of development of work in those areas.

Adam Grant: Claudia, what does that look like in your world at Sonae?

Claudia Azevedo: Well, we try to look at it as half half. So we’re still trying re-skilling in hard skills, digital, technology, another half, leadership, empathy. If people are gonna do more human jobs, we need also to train that. And it’s actually a skill that we are losing, an interpersonal skill. So that most of our training hours, I say would be divided half half.

Jayant Chaudhary: I had something interesting talking to that. At Davos, this is where you hear all the interesting things. Head, heart, and hand. That describes what we really need. Your heart needs to be in the right place. You need to empathize. And your head is about the brilliance of your mind. But you need the hand. You still need the plumbers and the carpenters and the electricians and the fitters. So that’s a description I heard, I thought that was spot on.

Adam Grant: I think on the heart empathy theme, I was stunned in the past year. I did think that was one of the uniquely human skills at this time last year. And the number of experiments that have come out. showing that if you’re interacting with a chat interface, and you don’t know whether it’s a human or an AI back, and then afterward you’re asked, how supported and seen do you feel? The AI is more empathetic than the average human.

Omar Abbosh: I mean, Adam, one of the things that we’re learning this year, so at Pearson we deliver the GED program in the US for people who don’t know that. There are 40 million adults in the United States who don’t have a high school diploma, and typically for very sad reasons. But then they come back later on in adulthood to get the high school diploma in the form of a GED. What we found is when we use AI tools for those students, it helps them overcome shame. The shame of asking questions in public, that they’re embarrassed to ask their teacher, and that they can ask their AI, and actually they find the AI sufficiently easy to get along with or empathetic that they can learn from that.

Joe Ucuzoglu: Think about, Adam, how quickly the conversation has changed. A couple years ago, we sat on a panel like this, and the sort of consensus was, well, humans will have more time to focus on what they’re good at. And people brought up two things. One was sort of EQ and empathy. The technology’s actually proved to come way up the curve and be better. And two, creativity. The technology is winning out relative to idea generation. And so now we’re having to rethink what are those uniquely human skills, and it’s a very different conversation. It comes down to agility. It comes down to being able to drive change, because that’s one of the biggest learnings of the past year is that people are resistant. And so those who are actually able to win the hearts and minds, who are able to overcome the fears, who are able to illustrate, how is this actually going to make your life as a professional, as an employee, better? Not just convince you that the company’s gonna do better. That’s all great, but if you don’t see your role in it, you’re gonna resist it. And the more people that resist it, the more the bureaucratic gears within companies actually serve as an impediment to adoption.

Omar Abbosh: I think Joe’s on to something really critical. actually here, which is, I mean, we can probably debate endlessly what are the uniquely human things. And, you know, I don’t know where exactly that gets us, but in an era where humans live longer and where we don’t know the jobs of 10 years’ time, the one thing that we absolutely have to teach people is learning to learn. It’s absolutely like a critical thing that we need to do a lot more on. And actually learning science and neuroscience has progressed a ton in recent years, so we actually know a lot about it. It is not expensive, but the system doesn’t know enough about it. The educational fabric doesn’t know enough. And I think we can do a lot more on that front that can help humans thrive and adapt and change in the era that Joe’s just been talking about.

Jayant Chaudhary: Speaking to the nature of AI, and, you know, politicians love naming and renaming things, I keep saying that instead of calling it artificial, because in the Indian context, artificial in Hindi would say nakli, sort of means it’s not real and it’s not at par with us. You can call it amorphic or shapeless, because it’s consistently changing shape and its role. So I call it amorphic intelligence. But I think what you’re saying is if it can be creative, it can provide leadership, it can think out of the box, think for the future, at some point think collectively, talk to each other, then really what are we going to do, play cards?

Claudia Azevedo: Well, I think our job as CEOs is very important. We have to have a sense of direction, because people are scared, they’re afraid. Every time they read in the newspaper that, you know, we’re going to lose I don’t know how many jobs. And the empathy of everybody at all levels of the organization is saying, look, this is where I think we’re going. We have to study, like do some workforce planning. These are the skills we need. And we’re going to do this path together. And I think that empathy at all levels of the organization is what is going to take us forward.

Vimal Kapur: One part I’m going to add is I think where the current technology is helping is to make the people more productive much more rapidly than we had imagined. Many of the equipment we supply, easy example is say, you have to run a plane, you need a pilot certified with 20, 30 year experience. That applies to many equipment which we supply. Those people are retiring. So if I’m an organization, I’m not gonna find a 30 year experience person, but can I give a 10 year experience person a tool and confidence that you can do it? So that is the new environment we have to imagine. So it’s a substitution or amplification, which it can provide. Now there’s a possibility that human doesn’t have leadership skills and still doesn’t have a confidence to say, no, I can’t do it. And that’s still in the human, but the opportunity it is creating is to make people more productive, more skilled, more rapidly, which is one of the bigger challenges in multiple societies of having people which can be given job, but they are lacking some finite skills.

Jayant Chaudhary: So does this mean we are leading to a skill-based hiring bridges?

Adam Grant: It will.

Jayant Chaudhary: Rather than a formal degree?

Claudia Azevedo: I think so.

Omar Abbosh: I mean, so we published some research actually just this week on the cost of what’s happening on the learn to earn conveyor belt. Sort of the way I joke about it is you put a toddler on the conveyor belt, at one end, they graduate from a fancy place like U Penn Wharton at the other end and they go to Wall Street. And that sort of general qualification pathway is clearly not enough. You have a whole range of vocational pathways and alternate skill pathways. And actually what we hear from employers is they want people with skills. And degrees can be part of that, but there are other ways as well. And I think we’re gonna see a lot more of that in the future.

Claudia Azevedo: I think that applies to everybody, right? We need, our skill set has also become obsolete. So I think the beauty of re-skilling that it really applies to everybody. And if it’s like skills is much better than I have to go off five years for a degree, right?

Jayant Chaudhary: There’s a brilliant thing that an organization that I heard about is doing is it’s targeting the older senior management, 50 year old and above. It’s saying, we’re gonna teach you AI first. So that insecurity of. of those people in that particular category gets sorted. Because there’s a lot of fear being built.

Joe Ucuzoglu: So just making this very real, I mean making this real intangible, you referenced the example of a specific use case that will be put in the hands of someone earlier in their career to take on a much more significant set of responsibilities that accelerates their own career growth. That’s the kind of thing that’s driving trust. What we see that doesn’t drive trust is when there’s a lot of hype and things get sold at an artificial level and then it’s put in the hands of people and they use it and it’s giving them the wrong answer and it’s not delivering on the promise and that breaks trust. So this ability to actually refrain, as great as the potential use cases are, to make sure we’re not over-hyping it, that we’re grounding it in the substantive reality of what the technology’s capable of today and that we’re actually involving the people who will be impacted. Because where we’ve seen this fail is when you hand it over to a group of technology developers and they run off into a room, generally the adoption rate is close to zero. When you build a cross-functional team that includes the people from the heart of the business, the actual workers from the function that are going to use that, and you pair them up with the technologists, you get something very valuable and the adoption rate is embraced.

Adam Grant: So I wanna bring this back to the skills-based hiring question for a second because on the one hand, I see the appeal. We don’t wanna just use pedigrees and credentials to decide who gets an opportunity. We wanna open doors for people who have lacked access. On the other hand, very often, as we’re seeing now, the skills that you hire people for today are no longer relevant to the problems you’re solving tomorrow. And so I think, Omar, to your point about the ability to learn, or Joe, as you described it, agility, being the most critical skill, how do you think about assessing that? I’ll throw out an example I saw recently at a call center. You go through an interview at a call center, you then finish the interview and you’re asked, how do you think that? went and you do a self-assessment of your strengths and weaknesses in the interview and then they give you a do-over. And the people they hire are not the ones who aced the first interview, they’re the ones who showed the most growth from the first to the second. Because then you can actually observe their motivation and ability to learn.

Omar Abbosh: We’re gonna see a ton more of that Adam in the future and you know we announced a technology partnership just last week where we’re gonna embed a lot of our assessment and skilling capabilities into tech platforms to meet people where they are at work. So imagine you are working in a call center in a foreign language, you know the AI afterwards can say to you, hey do you know like you could have said that sentence a bit differently, it would’ve been easier for them to understand. So you can literally use it as a job aid during people’s work. But to the point that Joe said, if you’re gonna put out this, I don’t really love the amorphous AI, but like the ambient AI, if you’re gonna put the ambient AI out there then you need to do it through the open front door, you know clearly declared and get the trust so that people are involved with it understand what they’re dealing with.

Claudia Azevedo: I think company culture has a lot to do with it right? And if you’re a know-it-all organization you don’t you don’t feel the need to learn, but if you get the corporate culture that everybody feels that they have to learn, that being curious is the the biggest skill they can have, I think that will help a lot on this way.

Adam Grant: So we’ve got four CEOs who are trying to build learning organizations and reskill entire workforces. We have a minister who’s trying to reskill an entire country. What are the practices? Only second largest in the world right? What are the practices and policies that you found most helpful and also most surprising for moving that needle?

Jayant Chaudhary: So I think just the room already has a sense of the scale, but we’re talking about 23-24 million young people joining the workforce every year. And even though we are training in our long-term training programs about 2.5 to 3 million every year, and in the short-term training programs over the last 10 odd years we’ve trained 16 million people, it is still nothing. And also as a point to what you’re saying that what we are training them is that what really industry requires. So there’s a massive amount of detooling. But what Vimal said is point. And it is something that all developing countries and similar economies like India, younger countries, younger demographics can take, is that if you don’t have a legacy system, you can, or even if you do, you can immediately leapfrog using technology. So my task right now is to use convergence, use a whole of government approach, break the silos, and with our national education policy, we have a mandate to reform our education system, to integrate vocational from schools going forward, to make it a flexible learning pathway, to creditize every aspect of it, to show value, to make it aspirational, to have a diploma program, not necessarily hanker and run after a degree, if that’s what the industry wants. So it’s a process. I think the process orientation always helps, because you’ve got to break it down into a series of tasks. And that is how we need to view jobs as well. So one of the principle asks, and here at Davos, one of the things that we’ve been trying to push for, what India is trying to take leadership with, is to get governments, to get countries together and sit down and say, okay, this is a job. It’s broken down into these tasks or these competencies or these occupation standards. And this is now going to be a global standard. So someone who’s a nurse or an architect in India can come very easily slip into that role in Germany or in Switzerland without having a non-trade tariff barrier kind of situation where they just say, you have nothing. You’ve learned nothing. You’re unskilled. So in India, outward mobility has always been an aspect of our soft power. People call it brain drain, but also in a way, our best export, our best resource is not our companies. It’s our people.

Adam Grant: I love this idea of breaking down jobs into tasks. We have some data on this. Amy Rezneski, Justin Berg and I did a large experiment at a tech company. recently, where we asked people to think about the skills they wanted to develop and basically tried to instill a growth mindset, and found that had no impact whatsoever on their happiness or their job performance. Like, wait, what’s going on here? Something’s missing. What we realized was a lot of people had fixed mindsets, not just about their own skills, but about their jobs. They thought their tasks were basically set in stone, and their interactions were determined by people above them who really were dictating their schedule. And we said, what if you take your job as a flexible set of building blocks? You can decide on the margin which tasks you prioritize, which ones maybe you delegate or offload. You can decide which interactions are important for you, and try to innovate on the margins of your job in ways that also allow you to develop skills. When we did that, six months later, spike in happiness, either no decrease or an increase in job performance. And I think that’s a really good reminder to say, increasingly, jobs are not designed for individual people, and mass customizing them is really hard. And so we need to give people a little bit of autonomy to evolve their jobs or craft their jobs in ways that advance the mission.

Joe Ucuzoglu: Well, this is going to be essential. So a bunch of the conversation this week has been about the agentic workforce that relies upon being able to deconstruct jobs and manage on an integrated basis your digital and your human workforce. And this concept of growth mindset, the example you used of the call center and how they’re screening for employees of who shows the most growth between the first round and the second round, we just updated our own leadership frameworks at Deloitte. And the number one skill set that rose to the top, it wasn’t about whether you’ve run for P&Ls or you’ve worked in 18 geographies, all those are great. The number one that rose to the top was growth mindset. Because everybody says that they are open to feedback, everyone walks in a room and they say, you know, I’m really here to listen. And then some people go on for the next 10 or 15 minutes to… sort of do everything possible to refute what they set up front and explain why each idea that comes up, yeah, we’ve thought of that and it doesn’t work here.

Adam Grant: And by the way, then we promote that person, mistaking their confidence for competence.

Omar Abbosh: That may happen, but I mean, on the skills deconstruction thing, I mean, we’re totally supportive of that. I know the WEF is pushing the global skills taxonomy. I’ve got one challenge with it, but actually you can take the job roles out of an HR system of a company, you can deconstruct them into skills, you can say which skills will be impacted by AI and automation, and then you can, and this is the hard bit, is to find the job corridors to say, all right, these skills are going to be taken up by automation. These other ones need to be reconfigured into new roles, and now we need to find the job corridor for the people. And so we do that for customers. It’s actually not that easy, and you can see it’s easier in technology where the codification of coding skills, for example, you could do that. When you get to something like nursing with a lot of hands-on things, it gets a bit messier. Of course, in the world that we’re in, these skills are going to evolve so fast all the time, and so creating something fungible and fluid is going to take some work.

Adam Grant: Claudia, I’m curious to hear about what this means for training.

Claudia Azevedo: Well, we’re doing three things. So internally in the company, we’re sort of mapping out where we need more resources, and for example, as a retailer, we have cashiers. We can take any level of the organization, and we say, look, there’s three options. Upskilling, going to the part of the store where beauty advisors and the freshers’ salaries are higher, it’s more human, or for example, in a totally different business that we own, which is opticians or hearing aids, there’s a lack of technicians in Europe, you can reskill to that. Part of it is your time, part of it is the company that’s going to give you time. So we’re doing that and making sure that in every place that we see, we can reskill. You can reskill. We’re also leading in Portugal a public-private partnership with the government. Basically we got the… 40 biggest companies in Portugal to see what skills they need. We designed a training program, and the government is doing the training and the funding for that. And that’s fantastic. That has been one of my biggest surprises, that it’s much bigger than the sum of the parts. Because having all these companies, having the government together has gone very well. But very difficult to scale up, because you train people six months, nine months. It’s great. Each person that you train is life-changing for that person, but difficult to scale up. So the third thing that we’re doing at the moment with Telfónica in Spain is a digital platform, the new career networks using artificial intelligence. People upload their skills, they answer a few questions. Inside the platform there are trainings that have been curated, and companies post what skills they need. All the training is digital, so we’re working at the moment on the three platforms, and learning and trying to go faster.

Adam Grant: I like the digital marketplace.

Claudia Azevedo: You can look it up. It’s called New Career Network. It’s available in English, in Spanish, Portuguese.

Jayant Chaudhary: We have the Skill India Digital Hub, which was launched a year ago. It has 10 million registered users. It’s part of the India Stack, so it’s a DPI. So we’re trying to build that out. All the functionality that you just mentioned, from linking as a marketplace, getting entries for jobs, and also the whole skilling ecosystem, visibility along the line.

Vimal Kapur: So I’m going to present a slightly different point of view. For a company like us, which makes products, we really have to reskill our product managers, because our products can be totally reimagined on what it can do, based upon the new type of workforce, but at the same time, how the product capability can change with embedded AI into it. If you do not reimagine the product and you try to do the skilling portion alone, you are solving half the problem. manager seems to be very small population in a big company like us. But they have a multiplier effect at a huge scale. So I think looking at the problem of that lens to say, have I re-imagined the product itself? Because all of a sudden, it has much more compute. You can do much more in a different manner. So I think that’s one segment one has to pay attention. Second, which I personally lot more attention is the leadership team have to do immersive learning. They have to practice AI and do something different. It’s not about reading a book to say, I read a book on the weekend. No, that is not the point. What are we going to do differently as a leader and adopt a different practice on how we operate? And our work style, work practices are changing. And we are walk the talk so that we can really preach the practice. But to me, those are the very two critical segment in companies like us where we can make a huge impact.

Adam Grant: And that last point is exactly where I want to take the conversation next, which is obviously the tone is set at the top. You’ve all been doing some shifting of how you think about your leadership skills. What’s the biggest re-skilling move that you’ve made personally in the last year?

Jayant Chaudhary: For me, it’s every day. I was in the opposition now in government, so a lot of learning. And my political constituency was farmers in rural India. And here, it’s about younger people talking about technology and what’s about to come. So I think it’s every day for me is re-skilling. And that’s the approach we should have, right?

Omar Abbosh: I spent 35 years in the technology sector. And about a year ago, I moved to the education and learning sector. So I’m back to basics as a baby student, learning a completely new segment. I couldn’t say that I knew much about the space. And indeed, just immerse yourself and learn as fast as you can.

Joe Ucuzoglu: And this modeling by example, I’m sorry.

Claudia Azevedo: No, it says for me, Davos is a fantastic way to check into the year, right? Every January, you come here and say, well, these are what people are talking about. I don’t know absolutely anything about this. So I have to learn during the year for the next Davos check-in.

Joe Ucuzoglu: This modeling by example is essential. I love your sort of, it’s not about reading a. book, if we’re telling people to do something, it’s falling on deaf ears. If they see us doing it ourselves and hopefully they would have some belief that we’ve done something right in our careers to be entrusted with these positions, then it lends itself in incremental credibility. So when I come here and I’m going to participate on a panel, when there’s a set of questions that comes out in advance, I love to feed it into the LLM and to be able to tell people, now am I going to use all of it and am I still going to use my judgment relative to weeding out some of the hallucinations, of course. But it’s an incredible creativity generation mechanism. If I’m looking at our financial results and I’m actually using some of our finance private LLM capabilities, analyzing performance, using the predictive capabilities, talking about how some of the insights actually came out of a Gen AI application, then the light bulb goes off, but we have to model it ourselves.

Adam Grant: I do feel that the record needs to show that you shouldn’t stop reading books. It’s just having written half a dozen of them, I think the deep thinking that goes into formulating the knowledge that goes into a book, it doesn’t exist in any other medium that I have exposure to. But I think that’s the beginning of learning, not the end, right? The goal is to actually put that knowledge into practice, not just to accumulate it in your head.

Omar Abbosh: I mean, and Adam, as you know very well, passive learning, so just reading and then cramming for the exam is not that effective. Adaptive learning where yes, reading, but then you interact within an AI that takes you through a Socratic dialogue, challenges you, practice retrieval, then you learn properly. And so we need books at the source.

Vimal Kapur: I can share my experience. I started my new role about 18 months back and I grew up in the business. I was a frontline person selling our offerings to our customers, project managers, now I’ve become CEO of a public company. To me, investor is a set of people who understand a very different language, even though I’m telling the same thing. So I have to really on my skills to tell the same story in a different manner. And when you go to employees, they wanna hear the same story in a different manner. So I guess re-skilling as a human has been a personal experience. You have to say the same thing to three different constituency without, and still have to be honest, but you have to re-skill to make it consumable by very different audience. If you don’t do that, you pay a consequence for that because employees don’t feel you motivated. You are a motivator, get the followership. Customers say, this person is so high level, he’s on your details. But investors said, you’re on too much of details, I don’t wanna know it. So how do you balance very diverse, and it’s a skill which you have to reorient to yourself. And I think a lot of current tools help you to consume that easily. I think we’re blessed to have those tools with us. And I think our prior generation did not have that opportunity.

Adam Grant: I think there’s something really powerful there. There’s a recent Frank Flynn study showing that leaders were on average nine times more likely to be criticized for under communicating than over communicating.

Vimal Kapur: Absolutely.

Adam Grant: It’s so easy to understand why this happens because once an idea makes sense to you, you explain it once and you think everybody else has got it and you suffer from a curse of knowledge not realizing how unfamiliar that idea is. And I think what a lot of leaders don’t realize is if you over communicate, the worst thing that happens is people say, shut up, we get it. And then you know the message has landed. If you under communicate, people think that either you don’t know what you’re doing or you don’t care.

Joe Ucuzoglu: And the reality is that being able to frame that message in a way that resonates with a particular audience, the human brain is still pretty good at. I’ll take that over the elevator.

Jayant Chaudhary: For now. For now. So let me ask you all this. In 2025, what is your personal re-skilling goal? What’s the one thing you wanna get better at? AI.

Adam Grant: Oh, come on, it’s low hanging fruit. What about AI?

Jayant Chaudhary: Learning the tools, I have no idea. I’m talking about AI, I don’t use them.

Adam Grant: Oh, well that’s gonna change tomorrow.

Omar Abbosh: Every executive should at least do 10 hours playing with LLMs, like at least. and like and and really test yourself with it and challenge it and make it ask it to challenge you and I think you’ll enjoy the the experience actually.

Joe Ucuzoglu: Prioritization. If we look both me personally within our organization across our client base there’s no shortage of great ideas in terms of the usage of Gen AI. The issue is that people are spread too thin. So I was just over with a client actually it’s almost late coming over here because it went long and this is a fortune 50 CEO and he says to me do you see anybody that has something in the Gen AI arena beyond proofs of concept. So everybody’s talking a big game but that ability to actually make some bets and pick a few and really roll up your sleeves and do the hard work in the organization to implement it at scale as opposed to having a bunch of great ideas that’s that’s my priority and frankly that’s where some additional focus is needed.

Adam Grant: Okay so we’ve got prioritizing, prioritization, meta-prioritization, we have AI tools what else?

Claudia Azevedo: I would say AI and actually this morning I was looking up like executive courses a week really to immerse myself in the States which but that’s probably what I get to do in 2020.

Vimal Kapur: I would say I have a lot to that you know immersive learning to the extent where such tools have been successful like cars are becoming autonomous what are the implications of that say other sectors so that’s a immersive learning not that you sit in the car I mean to me really understanding that deeply that what caused to get here and what is out of possible. I’m spending a lot of my time to because it is deep implication in the businesses we do because if car is autonomous plane can also be autonomous right it’s a it’s a in the in the end it’s a vehicle which carries passenger and it’s been intriguing to learn the development of semiconductor industry the chips the software and I think it’s just we all have to adapt to the learning what whatever is applicable I mean if that I have a simple mantra, the day you stop learning, I’m afraid I’ll be out of job very quickly. I mean, it probably went out of weeks or if not months. It’s just imperative in today’s world you have to just refresh your skills, be it leadership, be it technology, engaging with customers, I think it’s a constant learning all the time.

Adam Grant: Omar, what’s on your re-skilling agenda?

Omar Abbosh: So, I want to go deeper on vocational learning and new color skills. I think there are a lot of people that we’ve left behind in recent years and actually the advent of this AI allows us to help address a much broader population if we’re clever about it and that’s a zone I want to go deep on.

Jayant Chaudhary: My fear is that the more we talk about immersive AI and that we don’t need domain knowledge, you can just learn it on the fly, the more you are making it okay to not really take a deeper dive into anything. So, it’s a dumping down of all of us. So, to what you are saying that we must think about what you can do to the large sections of the population that are actually doing the real hard tasks and who’ve done two-year programs to learn to do that, work with their hands. I think we need to find solutions for them.

Claudia Azevedo: Maybe we need to reframe what is re-skilling because too many times it’s sort of the ones that are left behind and I think re-skilling should be aspirational and the questions you are asking, how are you going to up-skill yourself or re-skill and it’s very crucial to tell people in all ways of organization that it’s okay. It’s okay to fear for your job but there’s solutions out there that you can acquire new skills and progress in your career and so, I’d say reframing, re-skilling is important.

Adam Grant: I do think there’s an opportunity there. I loved a study recently by Sharon Parker and her colleagues looking at how people adapt to advanced manufacturing technology that was essentially replacing their jobs and what people did to cope with that was they paid attention to what the robots were bad at and then they derived meaning in their work from outsmarting robots and I think that’s a great way to put re-skilling into action. I want to go to the audience now. We’d love to take some questions. I will just put a few ground rules in place. Number one, Andrew Ross-Sorkin always reminds us that questions end in question marks. Number two, I’m going to ask the panel, let’s get one or two people to comment so that we can get to as many questions as possible. Right over here. And I think a mic will come to you.

Audience: Great, thank you so much. I’m an organizational psychology student at Columbia, so I’m still working on on getting to to your level of just understanding in this space. But I wanted to call out sort of one thing that I think is the the elephant in the room. Which is that, you know, I am I am one of very few black people in this room. And I consider that an incredible privilege and an opportunity and potential responsibility. But I think it is kind of a representation of how are we having some of these conversations in a way that AI doesn’t deepen the digital divide. And what I mean is not so much about, you know, black women. I’m talking blue collar workers. I’m talking individuals who don’t fit the traditional stereotype of of of what we think is is is professional. And I’m curious how you are thinking about that in your respective organizations. And I really do love, Adam, that you mentioned, you know, getting unstuck. And you’ve mentioned leapfrogging as well, Honorable Minister. So I think that that makes us think a little bit. And I’m curious how you’re thinking about that.

Jayant Chaudhary: Two aspects from a completely non-technical person who’s never used AI. One is that the algorithms that are the designers, the basic data set that is being used to come up with these solutions must also be diversified, must be open source as much as possible. I’m speaking from a developing country point of view. So data sovereignty is also important. The data set is important. And the other aspect is the user side. that AI readiness needs to be rolled out at a massive scale so I’m gonna go back I’m gonna learn I’m gonna get my ministry my staff officers together sit down and learn all the tools and then roll it out in the schools yeah I mean

Omar Abbosh: I’ll just I mean the ministers are 100% right the more the AI scales the more the price point comes down the more accessible it can be so let’s assume hopefully that we go in that direction the bit that I’m focused on is in addition to the AI complication we have a demography challenge in most of the West we’re running out of workers so actually that means companies and organizations need to find new sources of talent new pools of talent and they need to tap pools of talent that they’re not used to historically tapping and so we work with organizations on what we like to call their ships their mentorships their apprenticeships their internships so that they can find talent sources earlier and point them to their organizations and I think that’s a critical way to partially tackle what you’re talking

Adam Grant: let’s go back to the audience over here microphone is coming next one over there

Audience: wonderful panel Colin groth chief advancement officer strive together the 2024 Schwab collective social innovation award winner we lead a national network in the US of 70 communities working to build cradle-to-career pipelines in local communities one in fact is actually called learn to earn Dayton we’re launching a new initiative with Gates and Walton Foundation to think about what are the high quality pathways for young people to good jobs what advice would you give to local communities trying to bring together education systems and employers to actually make sure that the skills you are needing are getting into traditional education systems well first

Joe Ucuzoglu: congratulations on your award I actually think there’s a significant connection between both of the questions that have been asked and frankly if you ask me sort of what’s my main concern around taking this gen AI journey as a society it is none of the technical impediments we will figure out the technology we will figure out the change management the issue that keeps me up at night is the societal implications and earning trust that we’re actually going to do this in a way that benefits all communities and that is not going to exacerbate some of the divides. And so that raises issues around trustworthy AI. That raises issues around making certain that the data sets actually are part of the solution to bias as opposed to exacerbating it. And frankly, this is an area where it requires a very significant public-private partnership between us as institutions, companies, local governments, the education system, so that there is an insight into what are the skills that are most relevant to us and that can be cascaded down into the inner workings of those who are actually dealing with the next generation.

Adam Grant: Maybe I’ll just chime in on this one quickly to say, I think too many schools are reacting to AI by saying this is cheating and we need to ban it. The reality is students are going to use it anyway. So my colleague, Ethan Mollick, I thought created a great alternative. He said, what we need to do is we need to give assignments where you expect the use of AI and you show your prompts and then we’re gonna score you on how well you’re collaborating with AI tools to come up with better ideas. And I’ve implemented that in my own classroom. It’s been very powerful and I think we should encourage that kind of experimentation because it’s gonna happen whether we do or not. Over here.

Audience: Hi, first of all, wonderful panel. I’m a Schwab social innovator like Colin there. I work on livelihoods of persons with disability. So first of all, thank you, Minister, for talking about the data sets. I was like, yay, you know. So my question is a little policy related. It could be with the government or with companies. One of the insights we have is that actually we’ve never built aspiration and need for the new jobs. And we found that when we gave candidates even with severe disability like autism or neurodiversity or deafblind, the opportunity to go into companies and walk in and just see what’s going on, they start building the aspiration. So the first question I had was we have this Apprenticeship Act. I just want to know how well it is working. And I just wondered if you. I feel sometimes companies are resistant to that. You know, whom am I going to get? And I’m wondering if you could just convert it into an Opportunities Act, where people can just come spend half a day, but just start building that aspiration. Oh my God, this is what it is. They build aspiration actually for the people. They see the culture and things get built, and I think it can answer a little bit of these millions that we are talking about, and I feel strongly about India. I’d like it from a company perspective also. Thank you so much.

Jayant Chaudhary: Yeah, so India’s doing that. The Apprenticeship Act, as you pointed out, it’s an old act made in the 60s, and it’s a mandate. Not all companies follow that mandate. They’re doing it on their own without perhaps giving us the information. It’s a very powerful tool. So in that scheme, we’ve covered 3.5 million people up to now, and the PM Internship Program, where they’re saying take people who’ve never been employed and give them the red carpet treatment of the 500 top companies, they’ve given a 10 million target. So you’re absolutely right, and the companies need to understand that, okay, it might be painful to do the whole registration, informing government. There’s a process. You’ve got to jump through the hoops, but at the end of the day, you’re going to be able to retain those employees, expose them to your work culture, and save your money that you’re spending on recruitment and HR.

Vimal Kapur: I can add two things. You know, as a public company, you know, we see our responsibility, of course, to create shareholder value because we are owned by public shareholders, but also to grow our business so that we can create more jobs. And I’m always very sensitive that if you do not do that, you’re not meeting the social purpose for which a company exists to create jobs. And, you know, we as Honeywell has been very active on internship programs. I was sharing with the colleagues earlier, we’re hiring 1,700 interns in 2024. It’s our small contribution in this process. You know, our turn rate is almost 70%, almost that many people get employed, and we just keep ramping it up, and it’s global. And because it’s distributed by nature. is brings all kind of skills, all backgrounds of people, and it makes us a better company all the time. So to me, those are the two opposite end of our responsibility, create shareholder value, but don’t forget you have to create jobs because that’s why we exist in the society.

Adam Grant: You heard it here first, the purpose of the company is not to make profits, it’s to create jobs. I love that vision.

Joe Ucuzoglu: Different panel, Adam.

Adam Grant: Yeah, well, let me just wrap us up really quickly and say one practice I think is underutilized is a returnship where you give internships and apprenticeships to people who have been out of the workforce, disproportionately working mothers, great opportunity for re-skilling. I wanna thank all of our panelists. I think this has been a really rich and surprisingly entertaining discussion. I think that the basic idea here is pretty simple, which is skill gaps are a huge barrier to business transformation, to economic growth, and to opportunity for people. And I would love to invite all of you to join the re-skilling revolution, excuse me, to try to close some of those gaps and create more inclusive and more sustainable economies. Thanks to all of you, thanks to our panelists.

Agreement Points

AI as an enabler for addressing skills gaps

speakers

– Vimal Kapur
– Omar Abbosh

arguments

AI as an enabler to solve skills shortages

Opportunity for AI to help address skills gaps for broader population

summary

Both speakers view AI as a powerful tool to address skills shortages and make learning more accessible to a wider population.

Importance of leadership and soft skills

speakers

– Joe Ucuzoglu
– Claudia Azevedo

arguments

Leadership and critical thinking skills more challenging to develop than technical skills

Empathy and leadership skills needed at all levels of organization

summary

Both speakers emphasize the critical importance of leadership, critical thinking, and empathy skills in the future workforce, viewing them as more challenging to develop than technical skills.

Need for continuous learning and adaptability

speakers

– Omar Abbosh
– Vimal Kapur

arguments

Importance of learning to learn as a critical skill

Need to reimagine products and jobs with AI capabilities

summary

Both speakers stress the importance of continuous learning and adaptability in the face of rapid technological change, particularly with the advent of AI.

Similar Viewpoints

Both speakers advocate for a more flexible approach to job roles and skill development, emphasizing the importance of breaking down jobs into component tasks and giving employees more autonomy in shaping their roles.

speakers

– Jayant Chaudhary
– Adam Grant

arguments

Breaking down jobs into tasks and skills for more flexible learning

Giving employees autonomy to evolve their jobs and develop skills

Both speakers emphasize the importance of hands-on, practical engagement with AI tools, particularly for leadership, to drive effective adoption and change within organizations.

speakers

– Vimal Kapur
– Joe Ucuzoglu

arguments

Importance of immersive learning experiences with AI tools

Importance of leadership modeling reskilling behaviors

Unexpected Consensus

AI potentially surpassing humans in empathy and creativity

speakers

– Adam Grant
– Joe Ucuzoglu

arguments

AI potentially surpassing humans in empathy and creativity

Leadership and critical thinking skills more challenging to develop than technical skills

explanation

There was an unexpected consensus on AI’s potential to surpass humans in areas previously thought to be uniquely human, such as empathy and creativity. This challenges traditional assumptions about the division of labor between humans and AI and has significant implications for future skill development and job roles.

Overall Assessment

Summary

The main areas of agreement centered around the transformative potential of AI in addressing skills gaps, the critical importance of leadership and soft skills, and the need for continuous learning and adaptability in the face of rapid technological change.

Consensus level

There was a high level of consensus among the speakers on the broad challenges and opportunities presented by AI and the changing nature of work. This consensus suggests a shared understanding of the urgency of reskilling initiatives and the need for collaborative efforts between industry, education, and government to address these challenges effectively. However, there were some nuanced differences in approaches and emphasis, particularly regarding the balance between technical and soft skills development.

Different Viewpoints

Role of AI in addressing skills gaps

speakers

– Vimal Kapur
– Jayant Chaudhary

arguments

AI as an enabler to solve skills shortages

Importance of diverse data sets and open source approaches for AI

summary

While Vimal Kapur sees AI as a solution to address skills shortages, Jayant Chaudhary emphasizes the need for diverse and open-source data sets in AI development to ensure inclusivity and representation.

Focus of reskilling efforts

speakers

– Joe Ucuzoglu
– Omar Abbosh

arguments

Leadership and critical thinking skills more challenging to develop than technical skills

Importance of learning to learn as a critical skill

summary

Joe Ucuzoglu emphasizes the importance of leadership and critical thinking skills, while Omar Abbosh focuses on the ability to learn continuously as the most crucial skill for the future workforce.

Unexpected Differences

Perception of AI’s capabilities in empathy and creativity

speakers

– Adam Grant
– Jayant Chaudhary

arguments

AI potentially surpassing humans in empathy and creativity

Importance of diverse data sets and open source approaches for AI

explanation

While Adam Grant notes AI’s surprising capabilities in empathy and creativity, Jayant Chaudhary’s focus on diverse data sets suggests a more cautious approach to AI’s potential, which is unexpected given the general enthusiasm for AI among other speakers.

Overall Assessment

summary

The main areas of disagreement revolve around the role of AI in addressing skills gaps, the focus of reskilling efforts, and the balance between technical and soft skills in the future workforce.

difference_level

The level of disagreement among speakers is moderate. While there are differing perspectives on specific approaches to reskilling and the role of AI, there is a general consensus on the importance of adapting to rapid changes in the workforce. These differences in viewpoints contribute to a rich discussion on strategies for addressing future workforce challenges, but do not significantly impede the overall goal of promoting reskilling and adapting to technological changes.

Partial Agreements

Both speakers agree on the need for diverse skill sets, but Jayant Chaudhary emphasizes the balance between specialists and generalists, while Omar Abbosh focuses on using AI to address skills gaps for a broader population.

speakers

– Jayant Chaudhary
– Omar Abbosh

arguments

Need for both specialists and generalists who can connect domains

Opportunity for AI to help address skills gaps for broader population

Similar Viewpoints

Both speakers advocate for a more flexible approach to job roles and skill development, emphasizing the importance of breaking down jobs into component tasks and giving employees more autonomy in shaping their roles.

speakers

– Jayant Chaudhary
– Adam Grant

arguments

Breaking down jobs into tasks and skills for more flexible learning

Giving employees autonomy to evolve their jobs and develop skills

Both speakers emphasize the importance of hands-on, practical engagement with AI tools, particularly for leadership, to drive effective adoption and change within organizations.

speakers

– Vimal Kapur
– Joe Ucuzoglu

arguments

Importance of immersive learning experiences with AI tools

Importance of leadership modeling reskilling behaviors

Key Takeaways

Reskilling is critical to address skills gaps and enable business transformation, economic growth, and opportunity

AI is both disrupting jobs and enabling new ways to reskill workers

Leadership, critical thinking, and learning agility are becoming more important than technical skills alone

Collaboration between industry, education, and government is needed to align skills training with future needs

Reskilling efforts need to be inclusive and address potential societal divides

Resolutions and Action Items

Leaders should personally engage with AI tools to understand their potential (e.g. 10 hours using LLMs)

Companies should provide more internship and apprenticeship opportunities, including for non-traditional candidates

Educational institutions should incorporate AI tools into assignments rather than banning them

The reskilling revolution aims to reach 1 billion people with better education and training

Unresolved Issues

How to ensure AI and reskilling efforts don’t exacerbate existing societal divides

How to balance developing specialist domain knowledge vs generalist skills

How to assess and develop uniquely human skills as AI capabilities expand

How to scale up reskilling efforts to reach millions of workers

Suggested Compromises

Balancing technical skills training with development of leadership and critical thinking abilities

Using AI tools to augment human capabilities rather than fully replace jobs

Combining traditional degree programs with more flexible, skills-based credentials

Public-private partnerships to align education/training with industry needs

We want to create the opposite in terms of an optimal consultant, an optimal professional advisor, is someone who’s open to different ideas, who’s willing to take in information even if it might not agree with their predisposed point of view, so it’s the leadership skills that are actually more challenging to develop than the technical know-how.

speaker

Joe Ucuzoglu

reason

This comment challenges the common assumption that technical skills are the most important to develop in the age of AI. It highlights the critical importance of soft skills like openness and critical thinking.

impact

This shifted the conversation to focus more on leadership and interpersonal skills rather than just technical abilities. It led to further discussion about the need for agility and adaptability in the workforce.

AI is amazingly brilliant at pattern recognition. So actually, one of the areas that’s more surprising, if you look at things like the O3 model from OpenAI more recently, is actually how you can augment deep, deep scientific researchers.

speaker

Omar Abbosh

reason

This comment provides a nuanced perspective on AI’s capabilities, showing how it can enhance even highly specialized human work rather than simply replacing jobs.

impact

It deepened the conversation about AI’s role, moving beyond simplistic notions of job replacement to explore how AI and humans can work together synergistically. This led to further discussion about reimagining jobs and products in light of AI capabilities.

We need, our skill set has also become obsolete. So I think the beauty of re-skilling that it really applies to everybody. And if it’s like skills is much better than I have to go off five years for a degree, right?

speaker

Claudia Azevedo

reason

This comment highlights the universal need for continuous learning and challenges traditional notions of education and skill development.

impact

It shifted the conversation towards discussing more flexible, ongoing approaches to learning and skill development rather than traditional degree programs. This led to further exploration of skills-based hiring and alternative learning pathways.

I think company culture has a lot to do with it right? And if you’re a know-it-all organization you don’t you don’t feel the need to learn, but if you get the corporate culture that everybody feels that they have to learn, that being curious is the the biggest skill they can have, I think that will help a lot on this way.

speaker

Claudia Azevedo

reason

This comment introduces the crucial role of organizational culture in fostering continuous learning and adaptability.

impact

It broadened the discussion from individual skills to organizational factors that enable reskilling and adaptation. This led to further conversation about how leaders can model learning behaviors and create environments conducive to growth.

Every executive should at least do 10 hours playing with LLMs, like at least and like and and really test yourself with it and challenge it and make it ask it to challenge you and I think you’ll enjoy the the experience actually.

speaker

Omar Abbosh

reason

This comment provides a concrete, actionable suggestion for leaders to engage with AI technology directly, rather than just talking about it abstractly.

impact

It shifted the conversation towards more practical, hands-on approaches to understanding and leveraging AI. This led to further discussion about the importance of leaders modeling engagement with new technologies.

Overall Assessment

These key comments shaped the discussion by broadening the focus from purely technical skills to encompass leadership abilities, adaptability, and organizational culture. They challenged simplistic notions about AI replacing jobs, instead exploring how AI can augment human capabilities across various fields. The conversation evolved to emphasize the importance of continuous learning for everyone, not just entry-level workers, and the need for more flexible, skills-based approaches to education and hiring. The discussion also highlighted the critical role of organizational culture and leadership in fostering environments conducive to ongoing learning and adaptation. Overall, these comments helped to create a more nuanced, multifaceted exploration of the challenges and opportunities in reskilling for the AI era.

How can we assess and measure a person’s ability to learn and adapt?

speaker

Adam Grant

explanation

This is crucial for hiring and developing employees in a rapidly changing work environment where specific skills may become obsolete quickly.

How can we effectively divide tasks between human workers and AI/digital workers?

speaker

Omar Abbosh

explanation

Understanding this is important for maximizing productivity and leveraging the strengths of both human and AI capabilities in the workplace.

How can we overcome resistance to AI adoption within organizations?

speaker

Joe Ucuzoglu

explanation

Addressing this challenge is critical for successful implementation of AI technologies and driving organizational change.

How can we create global standards for job competencies to facilitate international mobility of skilled workers?

speaker

Jayant Chaudhary

explanation

This would help address skill shortages and create more opportunities for workers across different countries.

How can we ensure AI development and implementation doesn’t exacerbate existing societal divides?

speaker

Joe Ucuzoglu

explanation

This is crucial for ensuring that the benefits of AI are distributed equitably across all communities.

How can we integrate AI tools into education in a way that enhances learning rather than being seen as cheating?

speaker

Adam Grant

explanation

This is important for preparing students for a future where AI collaboration will be a key skill.

How can we create more opportunities for people with disabilities to experience and aspire to new types of jobs?

speaker

Audience member (unnamed)

explanation

This is important for increasing workforce diversity and providing equal opportunities for all individuals.