The AI Revolution: Are You Ready?

Imagine a world where you can ask an AI assistant for advice, receive thoughtful answers, and have your digital colleague schedule meetings, conduct research, take notes, and proactively contact coworkers to get work done. It might even challenge you to take a new approach to things, if you ask it to.

That reality is already here. Exciting. Perhaps a little daunting. Undoubtedly transformative.

The key question every leader needs to ask is: how do you ensure that you and your employees have the skills to navigate this transition? A recent report analyzes global work and employment trends, painting a picture of the future workplace where AI fundamentally changes how we work, increasing productivity and innovation in ways we never thought possible.

The report indicates that a significant majority of business leaders believe AI will lead to increased productivity, and are confident they will use digital agents as colleagues to boost their company’s capacity in the coming year.

AI agents are fundamentally changing how we live and conduct business; how we lead, develop products, and interact with our customers. They are becoming digital colleagues that support us with the tasks we train them for. We lead them.

This creates enormous, and unforeseen opportunities. Employees gain more time for personal development, reflection, and creative work. With the help of these agents, there’s less routine work and a more varied workday where we can spend more time with colleagues and customers – perhaps making us more human. Perhaps creating more value.

In the long term, this technology can increase competitiveness and benefit the economy. But it requires a new mindset – and education. For everyone. Understanding generative AI and how to harness its power is essential to avoid falling behind. We must collectively take responsibility and make the technology accessible to more people. That’s why we launched an initiative last year, a knowledge boost aimed at preparing people for the new era we live in, where, together with partners, we will train a large number of people in various forms of AI over three years. The initiative targets a broad audience, including students, professionals, decision-makers, and politicians, aiming to accelerate the adoption of AI.

A report emphasizes the importance of a comprehensive skills boost in AI for society to leverage AI technology. A new report shows that a large percentage of members want AI training, with over half preferring workplace training and a significant portion at universities or vocational schools. This indicates that tens of thousands of engineers are interested in AI education.

We are doing our part, but unfortunately, it won’t be enough. Efforts from more organizations are needed for us, as a society, to successfully harness the power of AI and to ensure that individuals and companies do not lose their competitiveness in the world.

Therefore, we urge more companies and organizations to contribute. It is important that companies and organizations both offer training and clearly demonstrate their training, skills, and AI strategies to their employees. New perspectives on skills development are needed to succeed.

Today, just over a year after we announced the initiative, a large number of people have already started their skills journey, and many have completed a course. Because demand is high, we are expanding our training platform with courses for both beginners and leaders, so more can keep up with technological developments.

Employees must continuously develop their skills as technological development accelerates. You never stop learning, which is both exciting and challenging. We have a shared responsibility in this. Together, we must help increase skills so that more can take part in the opportunities of technology. We must not allow knowledge gaps. We must not have divided worlds.

Sophia Wikander, CEO, Microsoft Sweden

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