Dive Brief:
- Less than one-quarter of AI use by professionals is tied to business-related activities as a looming skills gap threatens adoption at scale, according to CompTIA data. The organization surveyed 1,000 business and technology pros for the Tuesday report.
- More than four in five respondents use AI tools several times per month, but fewer than one-third describe themselves as having a high level of familiarity with AI, the study showed.
- “There can’t be an assumption that, at an individual level, people are going to come in with sufficient AI knowledge that can be applied in the workforce,” Seth Robinson, VP of research at CompTIA, told CIO Dive. “That assumption needs to be validated.”
Dive Insight:
The headwind adding the most friction to enterprise AI efforts is not related to compute access or costs; instead, it’s employees. Shoring up people strategies is key to automating operations.
Workers have applied their personal familiarity with AI tools to systems in the office, but experimentation has concentrated around lighter, repetitive tasks.
“They’re struggling to see exactly how their entire workflow is going to transform,” Robinson said. “And that’s not really on them.” The responsibility lies with enterprise leaders to integrate AI, build workflows that can adapt and create valuable use cases, Robinson added.
As AI budgets swell and CIOs grow more leery of runaway spending, establishing learning and training programs can affect returns on investments, according to DataCamp. A larger share of leaders who reported positive ROI on their investments also reported having more mature AI literacy efforts in place.
Part of the challenge with readying a human workforce to fully embrace AI comes from the nature of the technology, which represents a shift from prior technology adoption efforts, according to Robinson.
AI operates differently from the software employees have been using for years, Robinson said. While traditional software is deterministic and relies on fixed rules to deliver the same result, AI is probabilistic, generating outputs based on statistics and likelihoods.
“Internalizing that and truly understanding what that means to have a piece of software that’s giving you an answer that needs to be validated, not just for the applicability to the question at hand but even its correctness, that’s a new notion for a lot of people to grasp,” Robinson said.
CIOs hoping to clear the way for wider AI adoption can support their organizations by setting up a clear line of communication with HR leaders, Robinson said.
“IT leaders may not be fully aware of what’s available from the HR perspective when it comes to learning and development,” Robinson said.
