Among the conversations taking place during the Gartner Symposium in Barcelona this week is one looking at talent and how this will be affected by artificial intelligence (AI).

With an ongoing skills crisis, AI is being positioned as a way to help plug some of the missing skills IT leaders need.

But IT chiefs need to recognise that their staff may be worried that AI will take away the tasks people do during their day-to-day work, leading to job losses. People may be afraid to use the technology in case it makes their role redundant. Gartner recommends CIOs have conversations with their teams to work with them on determining how their job will be augmented by AI and how their job will evolve.

It is a conversation that Kirke Saar, CIO of Nordic Investment Bank, covered when she discussed training and playing with AI at work during the Benchmarking and communicating your AI progress panel discussion, saying: “We need to have the time and money to train our people.”

She urged delegates to find ways to enable their staff to play with AI tools daily. However, Saar admitted, the benefits to the business can be hard to measure, which can lead to a difficult conversation with the head of finance, who may be looking at the return on investment (ROI).

Gartner is urging CIOs to get their IT teams AI ready. By 2030, CIOs expect that no IT work will be done by humans without the use of AI. A survey of 700 CIOs from Gartner reported that three-quarters of the work IT teams do will be augmented with AI, and a quarter of work will be done solely by an AI. The analyst firm said that the survey results show that organisations must balance AI readiness and human readiness to sustain value from AI.

When asked about why IT workers would be willing to share their knowledge with AI, especially if they fear their job may be replaced, Gabriela Vogel, vice-president analyst at Gartner, said: “It depends on where the AI is being applied and if you are willing and to what extent you are willing to be part of that.” 

She pointed out that technology is a democratising force and it is shifting. For instance, as Vogel pointed out during a conversation looking at the results of the survey, there will be programming roles that will no longer exist. For Vogel, what this means for programming is that people will not want to train as computer programmers anymore. “You can’t train people because they won’t want to learn,” she warned.

Although the current conversation is focused on the ROI of AI, Vogel noted that beyond the need to make money for the organisation, the “return on employee” does have value especially when there is demand for skills. “You need to have a talent strategy. You need to have a development strategy and you need to focus on your employee value proposition,” she said.

While AI may lead to redundancies, she said CIOs need to recognise that the jobs market is becoming increasingly competitive. She said CIOs are realising that responsibilities for skills is becoming an important part of their role.

This means that CIOs need to be far more focused on human capital management. Rob O’Donohue, vice-president analyst at Gartner, said: “CIOs need to motivate their people because there’s a lot of fear that AI is taking over.”

He suggested they collaborate with their IT teams to look at how co-creation would work in their existing job and then define how their new role would look.

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