AI is turning every employee into a ‘tech worker’

Technological revolutions in business used to be a product of IT—and your whip-smart IT colleagues sourced all their insights from our pals over at IT Brew. But now, AI is rewiring how we work. That’s moved a lot of transformation responsibility to the people team, and it’s shifting how HR pros think about talent.

“We’re going through a major technical revolution, and the last few would have been the introduction of the Internet, or mobile, or cloud. Now, when these three things happened, it was squarely the CIO…that was driving those [transformations],” said Shibani Ahuja, Salesforce’s SVP of enterprise IT strategy, at a virtual roundtable event hosted by hiring platform Indeed on Monday. “We’re shifting to this idea of agentic or autonomous AI that can [be] like a virtual hologram that is working alongside me, traversing the virtual halls of our organization, getting work done.”

The AI transformation isn’t like the previous technological revolutions, she added, because it’s not a venture to reconfigure processes with new technology. It’s one that invites companies to reimagine their entire business.

“This is bringing to light the complete redefinition of an organization,” Ahuja said.

Only a few years ago, the idea of AI literacy referenced knowledge and familiarity with the idea machine learning, she said, but today, AI literacy involves the skills and knowledge to effectively and confidently use AI in daily work and specific settings, and that’s changing how companies approach talent, and skills, and hiring.

“AI literacy used to mean: ‘Teach people what AI is.’ Now it means, ‘Can you apply AI in your actual day-to-day?’ And not just engineers—product, marketing, HR, business analysts, all of them,” Ahuja said.

The evolving skill sets required to participate in the modern workforce are shifting toward more hybrid strengths. Curiosity, context-setting, communication, and judgment are just as essential as familiarity with AI tools.

Everyone’s a tech worker? Well, in some ways, yes. HR and talent leaders are developing new ways to understand how work gets done and identifying the necessary skills and competencies required to work with the right tools in ways that unlock new value, so the assessment of who needs those abilities is growing.

“For traditional roles…AI and the use of AI and the various tools becomes absolutely foundational in every one of those roles,” said Matt Candy, IBM’s global managing partner for strategy and transformation.

The workforce needs AI skilling and experience in role-specific ways that complement how the technology is being inserted into their workflows.

What’s HR to do? “If I think about the traditional role of HR, of managing people processes, that function is going to be so much more around the redefinition and redesign of work and powered through technology that the CIO and the technology and the organization can bring. So I think there’s going to be a really powerful coupling there as we head forward,” Candy said.

Candy suggested HR’s best move here is to reimagine work through the lens of which roles are primed for the infusion of AI processes, which areas of work need to remain human-led, and which roles require a bit of both.

Armed with an understanding of the ways AI might impact roles is the first step, but Candy went on to explain that developing a transformation program that builds psychological safety for employees as leaders ask them to inject this technology into their work. Be clear about where AI makes sense to add and what reskilling and learning is needed to continue growing your workforce.