Employers Say Machines Will Need Training, Too

In recent years, there's been no shortage of criticism that employers aren't providing enough of the training their workforces need to compete in the information economy. So here's some more fuel for this particular fire: executives report they'll probably need to "train" machines as much as they need to train people. A new survey of 2,000 business and IT executives from Accenture finds that more than three-fourths, 77 percent, believe that within three years, they will need to focus on training their machines as much as they do on training their employees. This kind of "training" involves the use of intelligent software, algorithms and machine learning. The same number of executives say they expect employees and intelligent machines to increasingly work side by side, in a collaborative way.