Cisco-led consortium to spread AI expertise in the workforce

Cisco and eight other companies today announced they would form the AI-Enabled ICT Workforce Consortium, as a venue to share generative AI knowledge and expertise in the workforce, and to help workers gain skills relevant to the newly AI-centric jobs of tomorrow.

In an official statement, the companies said that the first order of business would be to create a broad-based report on the state of AI expertise among workers, which would also provide “actionable insights” for companies and their employees.

Along with Cisco, the members of the consortium are Eightfold, Accenture, Google, IBM, Indeed, Intel, Microsoft, and SAP. In the statement, the group said that the impetus for forming the AI-Enabled ICT Workforce Consortium is in part the work done by the joint US-EU Trade and Technology Council’s Talent for Growth Task Force.

The first steps toward real insight into the issue of AI-related skills in the workforce, and retraining for workers whose jobs are most likely to be affected by the march of AI, is likely the integration of existing experience at the consortium’s member companies, according to Guy Diedrich, senior vice president and global innovation officer at Cisco.

“AI’s been embedded in our equipment for over a decade, so it’s nothing new to us,” he said. “But we have right now a state of the industry where we’re in constant transition.”

One thing that seems clear already, Diedrich added, is that there’s noticeable delineation between jobs that are more likely to be affected by progressively more capable AI and those that aren’t.

“One of the things we can assume is that skills that are more rote in nature, more repetitive in nature, are going to lend themselves to AI,” he said. “Those skills that require a lot of creative thinking, a lot of problem-solving are going to emerge as the ones that are critical for companies moving forward.”

“Those are the roles that will define how AI is used going forward,” Diedrich said.

Understanding the state of AI knowledge in the enterprise is also critical for addressing one of the most glaring concerns posed by AI systems: bias. Part of the idea for the consortium, and its mission of disseminating information about AI, is to bring a more diverse set of stakeholders into the AI world, according to Diedrich.

“If we don’t, then we’re just going to be taking our biases and we’re going to be perpetuating them more efficiently through AI,” he said. “And we just can’t do that. We need to have diverse people around the table, which starts with skilling.”

According to Nicole Helmer, SAP vice president and global head of development learning, the consortium will consolidate existing efforts among the member companies, some of which are already proceeding at speed.

“Inside [SAP], we already have a lot of learning on AI, but we also have a digital skills initiative which includes a free course on AI,” she said, noting that 96,000 people had already begun to participate in that course.

Helmer said that fears of AI simply doing away with many jobs in aggregate are overblown — “technology generally creates more jobs than it destroys,” she said — but that chief people officers and other HR leaders would have to take the lead on retraining and other shifts in the market.

“I think the changes we’re going to see are about AI literacy in the same way that we’ve seen the workforce become digitally literate in past decades,” Helmer said.

The group’s initial report is slated for release this summer. Diedrich said that the current plan is to release its findings to the general public.