Roundtable Spotlight: Skills for the Future in the Age of AI

If 2023 was AI’s breakout year, 2024 will be the year it becomes part and parcel of the real economy, bringing with it vast changes to the workforce. CEOs can expect their value creation processes, headcount, recruitment, and much more to transform as AI tools are implemented across their companies. In this context, how should they plan for the coming year and beyond?

At the first-ever Bloomberg House in Davos at the Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum, PwC’s Global Markets and Tax & Legal Services (TLS) leader Carol Stubbings hosted a roundtable to take stock of the shifts underway in the workforce and the implications for business leaders, policymakers, workers, and society at large. The closed-door session previewed new data from PwC’s AI Jobs Impact Barometer, which reveals how jobs are changing globally with regard to skills, wages, and productivity. The report, which analyzed half a billion job listings from four continents, will be released in April 2024.

The following are key takeaways from the roundtable “A Workforce Transformed: Skills for the Future in the Age of AI.”

We are headed toward a skills-first future workforce.
Although AI has been around for more than a decade, it’s still early days in determining whether generative AI will have a net positive or negative impact on job creation. Nevertheless, it’s clear AI has the potential to impact at least some components of the majority of jobs, according to multiple studies cited during the discussion. In this environment, demand will grow for those skills that are not replaceable by AI and that are transferable across roles and industries, such as critical thinking, emotional intelligence, resilience, and adaptability.

In the meantime, the war for talent continues in a challenging macroeconomic context. For instance, despite news of recent layoffs in the tech sector, there aren’t enough software developers to build all the software the world wants, highlighted one participant who claimed the supply to demand ratio was 1 to 8. AI will help bridge the gap, but ultimately organizations need to invest heavily in reskilling and upskilling the existing labor force, which is shrinking in many mature economies and is much more mobile. Companies with the most active and overt AI strategies are thought to be the most attractive to this talent pool that has ample choices and is on the move.

The potential for gains in productivity is massive but not a given.
Ideally, AI can be used to augment a worker’s capabilities to free up their time for other innovative and creative pursuits, while also leaving room for wellbeing, learning, and experimentation. This implies a complete redesign of the flow of work to optimize for human- vs. AI-led tasks, as well as the web of interactions between them. Implementing new systems, however, will be cost intensive. This may result in slower adoption and rollout among some industries, especially heavily regulated ones, to avoid the mismanagement of resources.

The opportunity for new revenue streams and business models is ample, nevertheless. Efficiencies will unlock economic value and drive volume which will in turn drive more demand for workers. But ultimately a systems redesign paired with strategic workforce planning will be the key to enabling “machines to get better at being machines and humans to get better at being humans,” as one participant emphasized.

The role of the CEO becomes ever-complex.
Leadership in every organization will face the growing pressures of a broadening set of stakeholders. An especially conscientious approach will be essential in order to avoid exacerbating the digital divide, which one participant argued has only widened over the last 40 years of disruptive technologies. As such, AI literacy will need to be prioritized in developing countries, with a focus on helping to skill those segments of the working age population that don’t currently participate in the workforce today.

Some initial data suggests CEOs are optimistic about the impact of AI and expect to grow their headcount, yet other studies underscore a lack of preparedness, suggesting that most CEOs don’t believe their organizations are ready for the transformation. Avoiding a culture of fear will be important, warned one participant, so that the long-term sustainability of the organization is not derailed by layoffs meant to gain an edge over competitors in the short term. As such, transparency and communication around decision-making will be essential to building trust, particularly as the potential for misinformation increases.