With the rise of generative artificial intelligence in the workplace, the half-life of skills — or the metric that estimates how long, on average, a skill may be useful in someone’s career — is getting lower and lower, an AI expert says.
While the half-life of skills used to be over ten years, it’s now under five, Kian Katanforoosh, founder and chief executive of the workplace training platform Workera, told Quartz.
In digital areas, the half-life is even lower, said Katanforoosh, who also teaches a deep learning class at Stanford that he co-created with Google Brain founder Andrew Ng.
The “real problem” is that workers don’t know what to learn, and don’t have time as technology evolves quickly, Katanforoosh said.
Whereas AI used to be a skill only a few people in an organization needed, it’s now one that touches everything from productivity to security and risk, he said. Therefore, workplace leaders should have a vision for what skills people in their organization need — and either invest in developing those skills or create job opportunities that workers can be retrained for.
What does an AI-ready workforce look like?
Katanforoosh said productivity is a leading indicator of job demand, and skills prone to productivity enhancements from AI are going to go away to a certain extent. For example, if it used to take a week to do a task that now only takes one day to complete, this indicates there will be less need for as many people to do that work in the future.
At the same time, there are skills that won’t be affected by productivity enhancements. These will become more important.
“At a high level, the way I think about it is, we want to build an AI-ready workforce,” Katanforoosh said. He added that this involves building AI skills and non-AI skills that are becoming more important because of the technology.
To Katanforoosh, the AI-ready workforce has four groups. The first is “a small group of people that are highly technical AI specialists,” such as data scientists and machine learning engineers, who are responsible for developing the latest models and platforms.
The second group of workers is called “AI+X” — workers with deep subject matter expertise in certain areas that are not AI, such as finance, supply chain, or media. These workers “are bringing AI skills to their career in order to solve complex problems,” Katanforoosh said.
The last two groups are the largest in the workforce. They are workers that need fluency and literacy of AI, respectively.
“AI is not only requiring us to develop AI skills, but is also impacting non-AI skills,” such as learning agility, problem-solving, creative thinking, and even behavioral skills including empathy and being comfortable with change, Katanforoosh said.
How should workplace leaders approach their workforce about AI?
Leaders should have a vision for what skills everybody in the company should have. That means knowing how to use AI tools and understanding the ethics of the technology.
Recently, Katanforoosh said he’s seen two types of leaders emerge: learners and pretenders.
“When a leader pretends, everybody in the organization has an incentive to pretend,” Katanforoosh said. This creates a negative culture and “dangerous amateurs who think they know, but actually don’t know.”
The other type of leader is one who is transparent about their AI skills and knowledge, Katanforoosh said, which “creates a learning mindset” for workers as skills evolve.
Knowing how to use AI is a “durable skill” in today’s workforce, Katanforoosh said. This means leaders should encourage workers to understand how the technology works and the potential risks and privacy issues that come along with it.
Governments should encourage companies to create more work opportunities
While governments in the U.S. and the European Union develop protections for workers from AI, Katanforoosh says labor regulations should actually focus on forcing companies to invest in jobs they think will be important for the long-term.
“If we think 10 years from now we will need a workforce that understands how to benchmark AI,” he said, then it’s up to the government to force companies to either continue investing in their workers’ skills or create job opportunities that workers can be re-trained for to keep up with innovation.
Katanforoosh sees a skills-based future where special skills have a higher value than other skills, eventually forcing movements in the workforce “that are healthy overall for everyone.”