AI is a skills challenge—one that can be addressed

Skills, in the words of the late Gang Starr rapper Guru, are “top rank, point blank,” and “vital”—for IT workers, that especially applies to AI.

But there’s a noticeable gap between workers’ current level of AI skills and what’s needed by organizations. At the MIT CIO Symposium this May, IT Brew asked Jonathan Kleiman, Stack AI SVP of enterprise AI, about the skills gap and how to address the problem.

In Kleiman’s view, the issue is adaptability. Organizations that embrace implementation are going to see better results, he said, and incentivizing change is key.

“The main gap that we’re seeing is a lack of adoption by certain teams, because there’s no training, because there’s no incentive structures to change,” Kleiman said. “Aligning incentives are the most fundamental skills that most people aren’t using.”

Hakan Gueren, Kleiman’s colleague and enterprise AI manager at StackAI, added that “90% of success in deployment and deploying agents comes from choosing the right use cases.”

“Once you identify the right use cases, then the rest, the 10% is a matter of practicality, how do you build it,” Gueren said.

Closing the gap. It’s an ongoing problem that IT Brew has reported on in the past—one that continues to bedevil team leaders and workers alike. Companies like Nvidia are trying to boost AI training. Computer science degrees are losing some of their luster, potentially restricting the pipeline of capable tech talent hitting the job market.

“You’re seeing experts going to consulting to teach people how to fill the skills gap,” Shanea Leven, co-founder and CEO of Empromptu AI, told IT Brew in February. “So, whether or not, you know, we’re up in arms today, I think that we’ll fill in the gaps like that will happen. I don’t know how exactly, but it will happen.”

Figure it out. Avoiding gaps as much as possible is part of the philosophy Mike Conover, CEO of Brightwave, brings to bear on his hiring practices. Conover told IT Brew that his hiring pipeline normally sees people with existing high-level AI skills because the company sells an AI product—it’s a self-sorting pool. Proficiency is part of the required skillset.

But Conover has bigger ideas for how to close the skills gap, he told IT Brew. A level of public investment that takes the AI sector seriously is “a strategic and national security imperative for the US.” This would subsidize the cost of access to the technology, he said, and allow for more personal education with these tools.

“There’s no excuse to have a skills gap here,” Conover said. “It’s so accessible and so extraordinarily powerful.”