The advent of generative AI technology has caught everyone’s imagination. The launch of ChatGPT in late 2022 created a massive interest. Generative AI technology is the latest in the Artificial Intelligence (AI) wave which encompasses machine learning, deep learning and now progressing into transformer architecture and foundation models. With all this buzz around generative AI, and a competitive landscape that gets ever fiercer, firms are asking themselves: “What new skills will be needed in our firm one year from now, and even more importantly, right this second?”

Skills are a key factor for the C-suite, as a recently launched report on Building the AI-first organization, discusses. There are jobs where AI will do most of the tasks, jobs that will be significantly amplified by AI and there will be new jobs where AI will form the foundation. This will impact the skills needed by AI-first talent:

1) Existing skills must be reimagined and enhanced with AI capabilities. Here the productivity of workforce will be augmented by generative AI based tools.

2) There are emerging skills where the focus is on developing solutions using AI and generative AI technologies.

3) There will be AI skills which are niche right now but have a high probability of becoming mainstream soon.

Companies need to analyze the disruptions caused by AI to the current roles and quickly identify the new skills needed in the AI context. AI skills occupy 2 ends of a spectrum – Consumers of AI and Creators of AI. Consumers of AI are those who understand what foundation models are and can leverage the power of LLMs with the use of bespoke tools or even using the playgrounds offered by the AI model providers. The main idea is to reskill them as consumers of AI for their respective disciplines to make them more productive and efficient. These are the AI-first aware skills that are applicable for all roles across functions. E.g., AI-first marketing, AI-first sales, AI-first sales etc. Prompt Engineering is a key skill in this spectrum.

While everyone develops AI-first aware skills, a small subset of employees, Creators of AI, need to develop AI-first builder skills, for creating custom AI models which capture the contextual information of the organization and enable features like semantic search etc. These require higher order AI skills like model building, LLM finetuning, AI trust, AI inference optimization etc.

While companies make this shift for building AI-first talent, there is also a need to relook at their job description (JD) systems. JDs typically focus on a set of activities and tasks expected in a particular role. With advent of AI-first skills and skills rapidly proliferating, there is a need to relook at jobs as a stack of skills as opposed to a stack of activities. The skill-based framework for defining jobs will make it more dynamic to adapt to changes in the skills spectrum.

Generative AI is fundamentally changing how businesses should organize themselves. The success of an enterprise deriving the most from generative AI depends on how well it formulates and executes its strategy on building the AI-first talent along with a dynamic skill-based framework.

• Photo by Pawel Czerwinski on Unsplash