This week at Enterprise Connect, one of the common themes across many of the keynotes, panels, and individual meetings I've attended emerged: The incorporation of AI throughout communications and collaboration platforms is going to require employees who have a whole new set of skills. The good news -- or bad news, depending on your perspective -- is that most of these skills are not easily acquired through structured certification programs. Rather, current and prospective employees will find ways to amplify already existing habits and traits. Among the must-haves for the next wave of work, here are a few of the common ones people cited:

Creativity -- On the panel "Retool Your Teams (And Users) for AI," Erik Delorey, Director of Innovation, Miratech, emphasized the value of having out-of-the-box thinkers: "Quite often you have very analytical, logical mindsets in your traditional development roles, so it's very important to find the person who is a creative thinker." The reason: they may have a different angle to figuring out where AI best fits in a communications or collaboration approach.

A desire for continuous learning -- Whether this was something explicitly encouraged or implied through many keynotes and sessions stressing the importance of training users on how to use new AI agents and assistants, the upshot is that vendors and practitioners see continuous re-skilling or upskilling as a natural part of the workplace now.

Empathy-led communication -- In the keynote panel "Navigating an Uncertain Future," Daragh P. Mahon EVP and CIO at Werner, talked about how one of the biggest challenges his organization faces is a shortage of human bandwidth for talking to people in productive and informative ways: "We don't have enough people or time to talk to people the way we should," he said. AI is meant to address the labor crunch but what was key was the idea that productive communication starts with meeting each respondent with recognition of what they need, then communicating with empathy. In other vendor briefings and panels, the idea of providing empathy in customer journeys was front and center; Cisco's keynote demonstrated how AI agents can and should reiterate what is important to the caller. But that AI has to be trained by people with some awareness of how we productively communicate. There's where people with an ability to study and understand communication come in.

Prompt engineering -- Depending on who you talk to, prompt engineering is a chance to develop another type of AI solution, merely a matter of knowing how to ask the right questions of any generative AI tool, or a dark and capricious art. But multiple people agreed that knowing what to ask was a must-have skill as gen AI tools becoming incorporated in every tool people use for collaboration.

Microsoft global business manager Taimoor Husain explained the importance of prompt engineering to me this way: Imagine you have a dataset comprised of every item you have ever eaten since birth; among the data attributes are whether or not you liked the food or meal, how nutritionally robust it was, and how you felt after eating it. Then you use that data to train an LLM.

"What's the first thing you ask that generative AI?" he said. "It's not 'What do I eat?' Because you already know what you want to eat. You know what you like. What you ask is, 'What is the best thing for me to eat right now? What food will best serve me?' You ask a question meant to address a problem or to improve on something, not to tell you something you can easily answer yourself."

Part of prompt engineering is knowing the why behind asking the question. But the out-of-the-box thinking that Delorey referenced above was also cited as being very useful for prompt engineering. His co-panelist, Christina Primeau, Head of Customer Engineering, Applied AI North America, Google, noted, "I think prompt engineering is very artistic and creative, and writers do it very well."

So take heart, all you creative professionals who worried about being automated out of your jobs. You just may hold the clues to how AI is going to work for the rest of us.

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Source - https://www.nojitter.com/digital-workplace/the-new-career-skills-the-ai-era-will-require