Rethink upskilling

Upskilling is the new corporate mantra, and unless you're running an AI-only startup (and maybe even then), your workforce needs it. But the old kind of upskilling -- offering learning opportunities focused on a siloed technology -- is not enough to get your employees or your company ready for AI at scale. True upskilling requires more than offering training courses. As executives in our survey recognized (50%), you also need to give immediate opportunities and incentives for people to apply what they've learned, so that knowledge turns into real-world skills that improve performance. Such a citizen-led approach is not only the most effective way to teach tech chops like creating data sets, building a machine learning model, or using Python or R notebooks.