Talent Strategy in the Age of AI

Now is the time to build adaptable organizations

Photo by Edmond Dantès from Pexels

Customer service representatives work alongside chatbots to answer customer questions quickly and efficiently. Sales executives leverage automatic lead generation and qualification tools to close deals. Marketing teams generate campaign content in half the time. Automated quality control, production planning, and inventory management all enable manufacturing teams to be more efficient and reduce costs.

And this is just the beginning.

Change is happening all around us and on a grand scale. Not only is technology changing rapidly, but workforce demographics and business models are too. As new generations grow up with AI and with an increased pace of change, the human brain evolves, which has the potential to affect how we live and work. In many ways, it already has.

What we’re seeing today in terms of skill and leadership gaps, attrition rates, burnout, and general work malaise are signs that much bigger changes are afoot across industries. While the future of work over the past couple of years has mostly focused on where work happens, now is the time to think more critically about how work gets done in this ever-changing business environment.

It’s about creating adaptable and resilient organizations that can scale, contract, flex, and pivot quickly because leaders have built and sustained talent as a core business function.

An organization’s talent strategy is typically composed of the roles and skills a business is looking to acquire, the learning and development offered, and the performance management necessary to measure quality over time. This linear and formulaic construct hasn’t changed for decades.

What has changed today are …

1. Skills needed: The roles and skills needed in an AI-driven economy increasingly favor digital literacy, data analysis and AI-related skills, as well as a greater shift toward ethics, lifelong learning mindsets, creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving skills.
2. Generational learning models: There are four generations in the workforce today with very different learning styles and needs. Members of Gen Z have always had a digital device in their hands — they’re entering the workforce and the way they learn best is through always-on experiences. Other generations may need more traditional or specific training.
3. Incentive strategies: What motivates younger generations (and others) is increasingly less about money and more about finding purpose in their work, making a social impact, and having a good work-life balance.
4. Digital business models: Digital transformation enables greater efficiencies in operations at scale. The increasing focus on customer experience is driving more human-centered design approaches. In an AI-driven economy, the interface to generate user data becomes the burning application that drives greater insights, new types of experiences, and new revenue streams.

All of this means the type of talent and skills businesses needed in the past 40 years are not the same talent and skills they will need in the next 40, let alone the next five.

Today’s digital evolution requires a return to human skills

Since the Industrial Revolution, increased specialization of skills and deep expertise have been critical in enabling the technological advances of the past 100 years. Before the internet and social media, we were working in information-scarce environments where finding information, analyzing it, and creating new information were the primary skills needed by knowledge workers.

Today, we are not only living and working in information-rich environments, but we have spent over 15 years training machines to analyze larger amounts of information than any human can process on their own.

Every industry will be changed in some way because of AI. In healthcare, AI will enable faster drug discovery, remote patient monitoring, personalized medicine, and improved diagnostics. Not to mention that AI-powered medical devices, telehealth platforms, and health monitoring systems will revolutionize healthcare delivery and administration.

This means healthcare front office, technicians, and practitioners will need to be able to adapt to continuously changing technology, but also be able to bring more human value to the healthcare experience through deeper relational skills like empathy, cultural sensitivity, clear communication, and a strong patient focus.

In retail and ecommerce, AI will automate things like inventory management, supply chain optimization, and customer support. It’s already helping deliver personalized experiences for customers. The people doing this work today won’t be needed in the same capacity, so traits such as emotional intelligence, problem-solving, creativity, adaptability, and communication skills become even more important for organizations to differentiate and win the customer.

A new type of talent strategy is emerging

The demand for AI-related skills will continue to increase, necessitating large-scale reskilling and upskilling efforts. These workforce changes will require greater investment in talent and the technology to support them. Organizations must be able to support new business models and ways of working. Talent strategies will need to focus on how to build an adaptable, agile, and fungible workforce to flex quickly through each new change.

Adaptable organizations are those with operating models, organizational structures, leadership, and cultures that are equipped to quickly take advantage of any disruption (e.g., COVID, emerging technologies, and economic slowdowns). They have the right talent on board, enabling them to develop new skills quickly and proactively manage performance for continuous improvement and development. They optimize for human-machine combinations to realize the full potential of the technology.

Talent acquisition, development, and management should be at the center of your business strategy as you look to leverage AI, evergreen your workforce, and build sustainable brand differentiation.

How to attract, grow, and manage adaptable talent

The most likely reality is not that AI replaces humans — it’s that humans with digital mindsets and high emotional intelligence become more valuable than those without these traits. The latest generation entering the workforce may have a natural predisposition toward digital, but are we preparing our future workforce with the right technical and relational skills to be adaptable in the face of constant change? And is your organization set up to attract, vet, and retain up-and-coming candidates?

Attract

Acquiring new, adaptable talent will need to include:

1. More flexible recruitment standards and practices that put more focus on a candidate’s potential, transferable skills, and adaptability, rather than rigid degree requirements or years of hands-on experience. Special attention to people who demonstrate a growth and learning mindset — and ability to flex into new roles with ease — will be key to getting the right mix of skills.
2. A strong emphasis on emotional intelligence. This includes skills such as critical thinking, creativity, communication, collaboration, problem-solving, and a proven ability to navigate change effectively. These skills are increasingly important as uniquely human skills that can’t be replaced by machines, and they’re critical for augmenting AI-generated output.
3. A laser focus on the right technical skills, such as AI and machine learning, data science, ethical AI, and AI model training. Other technical skills will need to be developed even more: UX/UI design to create intuitive and user-friendly interfaces for AI-powered applications, cybersecurity to mitigate AI risk, business strategy to envision and execute AI strategies aligned with business objectives, and communication and change management to effectively communicate AI initiatives and manage the organizational change associated with AI adoption.
4. A greater focus on how your workplace supports autonomy, purpose, and flexibility. This means paying attention to opportunities for internal mobility, ongoing learning and development, remote and flexible work arrangements, enhanced diversity and inclusion efforts, and employee well-being programs.
5. A plan for building a culture of adaptability through agile mindsets, clearly communicated values, and cultural norms. Quality leadership, modeling, mentoring, and mechanisms that promote psychological safety to fail fast, learn, and grow will also be important.

Grow

Growing adaptable talent is about creating learning and development approaches that accommodate different learning styles while prioritizing ease of use and learning retention.

Organizations should consider these for growing adaptable talent:

1. How AI can enable personalized and adaptive learning platforms that help serve up just-in-time, practical learning for specific roles or tasks.
2. Gamification, virtual or augmented reality-based learning that caters to short attention spans, competitive motivations, or immersive learners.
3. More on-the-job training that leverages job shadowing to gain real-world insights into skills needed and how they create impact for the business.
4. Enabling new technical skills and deepening relational skills for current employees through upskilling and reskilling programs that are personalized, incorporate an understanding of “what’s in it for me” (WIIFM), and appropriately celebrate successes and accomplishments.
5. Assessing existing talent against the skills needed for the future. Identify areas where upskilling or reskilling is both feasible and will net the greatest ROI. When hiring for specific skills, assess a person’s adaptability and creativity, as well as problem-solving and communication skills alongside their technical skills, as these are both critical for the long term and difficult to train for and manage.

Manage

To build greater adaptability of talent, you should evaluate your organization’s performance management strategy, considering the pace of change your organization is experiencing, the need for new skills across departments, and the needs of a multigenerational workforce.

The days of managing by activity or objective are fading, as the measure of quantity, volume, or speed of work may not translate to business outcomes that matter. And yearly or twice-yearly performance management cadences don’t allow for feedback that influences performance quick enough to make a difference. Both of these are key considerations for driving adaptability through performance management. In addition, the always-on information needs of people necessitates a greater frequency of coaching conversations to ensure people can address skill gaps quickly, with the ability to swiftly identify high-performing and high-potential employees for leadership to do continuous succession planning at scale.

Performance management needs to adapt in these key ways to enable greater organizational adaptability:

1. A greater focus on outcomes, not activities
   AI will continue to evolve to handle more of the tactical business “activities.” This will free employees to focus on the business outcomes that matter, like customer experience and satisfaction, revenue growth or cost efficiencies, and future strategies that will enable sustainable business success. By defining success, clarifying the relationship between their roles and the desired business outcome, tracking progress in visible ways, and providing near-real-time feedback, you can identify key triggers for positive or negative behaviors that show employees where to focus, fast.
2. Collaborative performance management
   Creating high-performing teams that quickly and adeptly achieve company goals requires employees to grow their skills while also engaging them in the growth of their colleagues. Employees need pathways and environments that foster psychological safety to provide feedback to their teammates and leaders. Building a culture of feedback and creating continuous and collaborative learning opportunities (e.g., job shadowing, automated and organic job feedback loops, etc.) fosters high-performing teams.
3. An ability to quickly identify and develop high-potential talent
   The pace of change we’re experiencing means identifying high-performing employees and developing leaders requires real-time performance data, analytics, and machine-learning enabled insights to:

• Analyze performance review, skills assessment, and work product data to identify training and development opportunities that will benefit the company.
• Create personalized learning plans for employees based on their learning styles, needs, timelines, and more — instantly connecting each employee to key learning that could help them in their current role or project.
• Identify succession paths for leaders based on their current team, skills, and performance and recommend effective coaching opportunities.

How will you adapt your talent strategy for the future?

Adaptable businesses will be the ones that find new ways to grow no matter what the future holds. It’s important to think critically about your culture, leaders, people, and technology. Take the first step by understanding what skills and capabilities your organization will need to deliver on your business strategy tomorrow, and then make an honest assessment of where your gaps are today. Then think about how your organization can thoughtfully and strategically acquire, develop, and manage your talent using AI to support and amplify the human assets you have.

A talent strategy that recognizes the complexities and potential of AI — and empathetically balances that with human needs — can enable businesses to thrive amid great change.

Slalom is a global consulting firm that helps people and organizations dream bigger, move faster, and build better tomorrows for all. Learn more and reach out today.