AI Reskilling and the Intersection of Society and Tech | AnalystANGLE
hello and welcome to this episode of the analyst angle I'm Shelley Kramer managing director and principal analyst here at the cube research and today our show is going to focus on um Ai reskilling and the intersection of society and Technology no small topic to be sure um and this really kind of came out um some news that came out of Microsoft about a week ago um where they announced plans to train two million people in India with skills in AI by 2025 um you know obviously as countries and governments and organizations across the world race to ramp up their investments in AI there's a very real need to Future proof workers and and also to address you know and a lot of how Microsoft positioned this is as a goal to address inequality as fears of jobs being killed off stand a very real chance of deepening those inequalities um in Microsoft's case this training will be delivered in partnership with governments and organizations nonprofits and communities and it's intended to help the future Workforce harness ai's potential so um when news of that was circulating a little bit on the interwebs I happened across some conversations with some fellow industry veterans and analysts and I thought it would be a great topic for us to address in this show so with that I am pleased to welcome my guests Betty junad and sarg joal to the show guys welcome it's great to have you hello hello happy to be here absolutely thanks well you know before we dive into our conversation let me have each one of you just do a brief intro of yourselves and kind of a little bit about your background I do have to say um when Betty and I were talking about this in advance of the show she um she described herself as a tech industry veteran and self and opinionist so I need to say that out loud because in case she leaves that out of her description of herself I think that's kind of brilliant so Betty take it away thank you Shelly um so uh Betty janat happy to be here um I have worked at um major tech companies like VMware Docker solo.io um really kind of at the early stages of when they're disrupting um the industry and specifically in uh marketing and go to market roles hence you know the catchy uh you know a tech opinionist title I love it I love it and serg yeah thanks sh again bu nice to to be with you again today um I see myself as a technology strategist I have done a lot of work as a developer in the industry and then a lot of pre-sales work at um operations companies at we are at EMC um at orle cloud and and Rackspace and places like that and mostly um te technology focused but technology strategy and in sort of if you want to be precise I'm I'm economics major who fell into technology when I came to us in '94 so I put that angle on um in my talks and and in my analysis absolutely I think that makes perfect sense well I will say that I spent 20 some years of my career as a marketing brand strategist so I feel like you know I I think that one of the things that so interesting about you know sort of a team approach to analyst relations you know and and I know that you both we both do a lot of things with the two of you um but for our team here at the cube research you know we've got analysts who are former product managers and we've got analysts who are former um analysts with gigantic firms and then we've got somebody like me who brings the marketing and brand strategy expertise to the table and so it's always interesting to see sort of how you need all of those skill sets I think along the way you know yeah absolutely make a well-rounded organization absolutely so let's go back to this Microsoft announcement okay now you know I very much again this is not you know this is not something that Microsoft is the only company doing and and not to take anything away from their movie I think this is is important um And Timely um but I think that you know in general technology vendors feel a responsibility to lead this reskilling effort I would very much agree with that one of the things I think that interested me in having both of you on this show to talk about this though is that you know Serge in in um in the conversation that was taking place on Twitter around this one of the things that you mentioned that I thought was particularly interesting was you talked about the importance of Microsoft Google Cloud Amazon meta apple and others creating what you called skills gravity for their platforms will you talk a little bit about that yeah sure actually um that was under the premise of what I call it bigger the system more self-healing it is actually when we talk about a loss of Jobs versus a new technology coming to the picture and then why these vendors train these people and it's not that they want to do some social welfare it's not you know just some you know Noble idea they have they want to improve their business just in order to improve their business they have to train new people on their technology stacks and that helps people to get that training new new entrance as well as people who needs to be retrained on new NE Technologies so it the system sort of sort of um self heals for the most part right that that was my my premise and the idea of skills gravity actually I came up with that sort of term about like I think four or five years back back when everybody was talking about the data gravity in cloud and I started talking about the skilled gravity as well because in a nutshell um practitioners invest in Stacks as well just as the Enterprises which consume technology they do so once they pick a stack or a platform they got training in it they want to continue with that unless that thing is dying or or flattening out or or going out of you know fashion technology like fashion we never done with it actually that's another thing you know which is um one good oneliner so just to um get that you know skills people skilled what I call skills gravity that helps vendors sort of make more sales and keep um more business with them just like data gravity in in Cloud context we were talking at for for in context for ews right and then Microsoft came as number two and then now Google cloud is number three so similarly the training creates that skills gravity for vendors VMR had bunch of you know uh certified professionals Cisco had old back in the day lot of professional CCNA and all that certifications so that keeps people there with their Stacks see that's what that was my idea about of skills propy yeah I mean I would love to hear from you both actually how you see that you know I think that you make some valid points I will say that one of the things that caught my eye about the Microsoft announcement is that um part of their release on this said that their their commitment included partnering with national and state governments to give basic Advanced AI training to 500,000 students and job Seekers okay I get that um indepth AI Technical Training for 100,000 young women and raising awareness of responsible AI use and AI enabled Caregivers for 400,000 students in schools in remote and tribal areas so I I totally agree with you that in many instances this is a self-serving act by Tech technology vendors I absolutely you know keeping people trained on your on your products and all of that makes perfect sense right and again I do also feel that these vendors feel a responsibility to invest in reskilling initiatives but I thought this in particular this you know focusing on young women focusing on Caregivers for students and you know in remote and tribal areas I think that's an important part of the equation here that you know kudos to Microsoft for this in again Microsoft is not the only technology vendor focusing on these kind of communities and things like that but I think that's an important part of this that I want to be sure that we recognize yeah and if um you know when you think about that I think the thing that's interesting is that um because the announcement also focused on addressing inequity um so I think that that really nods to like the different populations um one of the other things is to what Ser G just talked about like having these vendors you know making training um readily available uh things like um you know VMware and like Cisco some of the examples he provided is like those are highly specialized technical skill sets yes um some things with AI the way that especially with generative Ai and how it can be used now it's it's so much more readily accessible in a way to the non-technical user so how can I yeah I just logging into a website um can how can I better ask a question to jump start an interest I may have as a young person um in a topic that maybe formal training or education on that is not available in my region um but you know what I have a I have a mobile phone you know I have um my hand at all times yeah yeah that gives me access to the internet it gives me power in in ways that um some of the other you know doing like um you know like a major networking infrastructure class over a phone is very different than asking um you know an AI a generative I client to like teach me about XYZ topic yeah yeah absolutely and just highlight what what uh Betty just said great Point actually uh it's a highly accessible technology but AI itself can train you to use AI better so AI in many ways can train you to you know do better AI it's like you know you can get use it in more effective ways but also you can learn other technical skills using AI so it's very versatile technology it's a argumentation uh for human sort of cogn cognitive abilities that's what I see it yeah absolutely Betty I know that you said that you had spent a little time doing some research about um you know kind of what's ahead in the workplace and one of the one of the stats that you highlighted was that you know there's expected to be an 85 million person shortage of software Engineers I mean that's no small number but I'd love it if youd share a little bit more of some of the information that you have accessed as we prepared for this conversation yeah I was looking up um some things around the the uh you know available talent and skills right especially along this topic of how can AI help a rescale the workforce and it was a fascinating statistic from the US Labor Department saying that by 2030 which is now only a handful of years away right um you know the global global shortage of software Engineers May reach 85 million um and that's across you know um you know companies like your bank right you know your the banks that we're working with grocery stores to companies like Microsoft Google AWS it's everybody all in um across all those jobs they're trying to you know sofware Engineers to create products that you know will generate Revenue um you know generate Revenue for those companies you know paychecks for the people and help grow the global economy and so when you look at it from that perspective um it's fascinating so can these Technologies help you know shorten or jump start the individual to learn the skills um also how do we teach them to better use something like AI to um help better solve their problems um there's some other studies out there um and I uh Escapes Me on exactly where um where I had seen it but you know senior Engineers tend to have better outcomes their their productivity is gr vastly improved using um generative AI versus um a beginner um developer mostly because a senior engineer may have has a better context for the kind of questions to ask so in some way yeah that makes better sense yeah if you know a little more about context I can ask better questions so one of the things might be is when you're training people which ni is like how can how do we change how we ask questions what we do to make to get the most out of this tool you know get better use out of the tool to help us in our workflow there's a whole there's a whole cottage industry here um that is springing up and just like learning how to query right I mean because if you don't know how to query um you know you're only going to get out what you put in right and so it's really it's really interesting and the other thing that I think is interesting that I see I have twin daughters who are high school seniors and so you know I'm involved in the college parent conversations and things like that it's fascinating to me how many young people are going into fields that are expected to be highly impacted by AI that have no idea about this so they're not planning around this journalism is one of them and by the way I'm not discouraging anybody from you know majoring in journalism but if you're going to major in journalism you really need to understand what's going on in the industry right um as you kind of start to make career plans and I think another thing that we hear a lot about are you know is the the statement that um gener of AI is going to replace coders because you know it does it so much better and everything else well the reality of it is that's really not true you know is geni going to work alongside humans and software engineers and creating you know better iterations of software moreap rapidly probably um is it going to do away with software engineers in general absolutely not so it's just kind of interesting to see how how this is evolving we don't have go ahead please oh no I was just gonna say we don't have enough software Engineers anyways so the idea that we can you know get more out of um be able to augment the people that are trying to develop software with AI it's it's it's good for all of us yeah absolutely SG were you going to say I think I think somebody came up with this clever so one line and it says it's not that gen or AI will replace you it's the person who knows Jen I will replace you 100 person who replace you but not the technology right well that's what I mean about the cottage industry and learning queries and you know I was on a briefing yesterday um with um the team at a big technology company one of the things that they were asking us was you know what are we hearing in the market as it relates to AI what do we think that customers are struggling with and challenged by and everything else and you know one of our responses was that you know a lot of Technology firms are offering you know will help get you started with your gen instances throughout the organization and and my comments on that was you know I think customers are looking for more then will help get you started because this is a whole new frontier and I think that the technology vendors who are best positioned to grab market share in this economy today are the people who treat this as a partnership and who truly will slide in alongside teams and not only help you get started but help you get the you know the best and the quickest Roi out of your investment in all things related to AI absolutely yeah I totally agree I think I I think the vendors who can train more people quickly they will reap the benefits of um their St being out there more quickly and yeah they will gain the market share that's how it goes skills gravity yeah skills gravity right most skill gravity for their stack actually that's what exactly yeah well and you know I I mentioned this earlier in the in the conversation but i' just share here that you know Google cloud has a new gen um training uh program and they have like seven or eight courses that you can take for free um to learn Genai and um on a on a bigger scale you know IBM who went all in on AI famously quite a while ago um you know making announcements that remember when Arvin said that you know hiring was going to shut down in any areas where you know geni could play a role and you know that kind of set shock waves through the industry but you know um IBM's research uh for business value found that their Executives estimated about 40% of their Workforce would need to rescale over the next three years due to Ai and Automation and so and this was something that they said in October of 20123 IBM's made a commitment to train two million people two million workers in AI in three years and they are also focused on under represented communities and Equitable access is a priority so that no one is Left Behind um IBM also offers a bunch of skills build courses um Amazon is another one and Amazon has long had initiatives as I have many Tech vendors in in high schools and even in Middle Schools kind of helping to train the next gen of tech workers but in September of 2021 so a couple of years ago Amazon committed 1.2 billion um to provide 300,000 employees with access to education and skills training programs including College tuition for Frontline employes employees um and this was through 2025 as part of their upscaling Amazon upscaling pledge so this is their own employees which I think is really important um and so you know we we are seeing technology vendors really stepping up and but you know as you both have said this is certainly something that is not an altruistic effort this is something that is makes good business sense makes good business sense for them um because they need the employees to keep their businesses going forward um but in order you know all the training for those outside their organization focuses on their adoption but when you have disruptive Technologies like this just how we do things change so and not just what we use but how we do things so um it makes good sense for you know the more we can get everybody using things responsibly together um it kind of it can if done the right way could unlock more um for industry as a whole yeah absolutely s Jean what do you think yeah I think if we were talk about numbers actually I I wrote down before we turn the cameras on prep in June 2020 U Microsoft will train 25 million people with digital skills like and December 2020 during reinvent Adia said we will train 29 million people on on ad yes Cloud related um sort of Technologies um October 2021 Google said 40 million that that's the number they gave for cloud skills right it's not to digital skill Cloud skills look more precise and two days ago Google there's news heading the wire two days ago Google pumps $27 million into AI training after Microsoft says what they are training like 2 million people or something that in India you know rural parts of India or small towns of India right and um they the actually it it depends who the vendor is what technology they provide if it's b2c or B2B and how accessible that technology is as Betty said earlier right so if it's very accessible people will learn that faster and it will it will you know spread like wildfire but if if you're learning Oracle you know database um you know you want to be Oracle DBA you know DB Dy sort of persona but you know if you want to be good at Oracle database you can't learn it like there's no way you can go you know online and get it right so you have to have you have to work somewhere right most of the time right so that was a traditional sort of way these vendors like lock doors not giving you access to their technology so all those vendors are kind of shrinking in size and and their influence I I I will say I think the it's age of um opening up and you know giving free access to the practitioners early on um that's how you put your technology out there and actually that that's a when I talk to the vendors that's my number one suggestion to them is like you know train train train train as much as people you can train on your stacks and U that that will do you that will do you know like a magical favors to you as as a VOR please yeah yeah you know we did um we did a research study um for an automation vender a handful of years ago and one of the things that I thought was so interesting about this particular study a lot of times when you do research um Brands want survey responses from senior leaders Executives CI CTO that sort of thing and what this particular technology vendor was interested in was more midlevel and Frontline workers and the the conversation the the topic was all around Automation and Ai and how that was changing the workplace and it was so interesting to I I felt like it was so interesting to come at it from that Viewpoint and what we learned was that you know of course in many instances you know we hear um you know AI is going to displace workers and AI is going to take jobs and all of that sort of thing and the reality of it is you know technology alone is never the answer and this is something that I you know I've said a million times since we started talking about digital transformation in the last decade right I mean technology alone is not the answer it's a combination of people processes and technology that make the magic happen um but it was really interesting to get feedback from the employees at this level within an organization because what what they said resoundingly was that you know we're excited about this and we want to level up our training and we so look forward to but you know we look forward to learning new skills but we also want to be a part of the conversation around this um you know we're on the front lines we're the people who are interacting with customers maybe it's in a contact center or maybe it's somewhere else where we're having Direct Customer um feedback or interface but I thought that was really interesting like involve Us in the conversations um let us contribute our knowledge and our insights as you make decisions about these things and then of course you know where you end up when you do that is you have more rid adoption you have better informed employees there you know you kind of I think you kind of create a culture of innovation when you approach integrating Ai and geni into your business operations but I that always stuck with me I thought that was really a smart way to go about it but equally important is I've had conversations with some of those employees um and this is actually even before geni became a thing and we were talking about RPA being you know kind of and low code no code Solutions being introduced throughout organizations and I I've had so many conversations um with people who've shared things like you know I just had an ordinary average job and um I had an opportunity to learn how to do this and how to learn you know to write um you know how to create Bots and create automations throughout the organization and it's just like and now I'm in a position where I'm kind of like an ambassador and I'm teaching other people in the organization how to do this and it's just like I've loved my job anymore like this is so exciting so so there I think there are amazing opportunities ahead in the workplace for people and it really just kind of depends on how we approach that in terms of what kind of outcomes we see absolutely I think when you talk to like you say the people in the front lines they can probably give U more concrete use cases to where um AI you know these various AI use cases can be used to you know make things more efficient um help you know get to um ISS issue resolution faster and things yeah know well you know Betty as um the you know the conversation that this conversation started because I saw the news about Microsoft and I saw you commenting on it sarj and then I saw you popping in and commenting Betty and one of the statements that you made was you know this intersection of society and Technology it's complicated so as we get ready to wrap our show do you have any final thoughts on that it's complicated so I think it's one of those things in that um for society as a whole to advance it needs to go together with the concerns of just the humans and the concerns of Commerce um because it's not they're they're not mutually exclusive so I think what customers yes yes yeah customers the people that work at um the work fa the customers um and you know just looking at all of it as one giant ecosystem right um so it's good to to see these um these kind of inies being announced early on in this this wave yeah absolutely SAR G do you have any final thoughts or advice strategic advice for our viewing and listening audience definitely actually um I think the number one advice in this context you can give is like always always be learning actually you know so as humans actually they human progress we have made you know we have Rockets now from starting with fire and lever those basic inovations to where we are today we build on top of existing Innovations so if we don't learn about the the sort of what's Happening Now the new innovation is coming down the pike and it's a convergence of many factors what makes new things happen so you guys you got guys and girls need to keep your eyes and ears open to what's happening around you even if you are specializing in let's say Finance you need to learn how how the little bit about the how the factories work and what are the what's happening new and material sizes so the the importance of interdisciplinary learning is I think it's very important these days like you got to understand how all these different things uh will be put together especially when AI will be answering most of our questions going forward like we have a knowledge repository knowledge the cost of knowledge is going down towards zero going going forward so what we will do as humans is like put these things together and and make make sure the convergence of all these you know advancements are helping Humanity so I think that's what my advice is I think that's terrific advice I think the the the thing that I will leave uh the audience with is that I think that we need to remind ourselves that um generative AI produced information is not necessarily the holy grail and you know certainly not today right and so so sometimes you know it's it's um what is the trust but verify adage or whatever um you know a lot of times I do queries or I look things up on perplexity or whatever else and you know it's just an interesting time because you really have to work sometimes a little harder to to get to the veracity of what it is your um your looking at and and figure out is this 100% accurate is there room is there some wiggle room here is there some bias here I think those are the kind of things at these early stages that we need to keep in mind yeah I want to just this is amusing quote from uh gr B who's IBM fellow he said a fool with a tool is still a fool which is very KY sort of phrase right so like don't be fooled by the tools right so like like what it means is like you have to know the context of what these tools are meant to be used so the context is important your domain knowledge will actually will set you apart and there's no shortcut there's no compression algorithm for experience you know what what Andy ji of um Amazon says right so yeah uh put your hours in uh work hard understand the domains you are in um keep learning always learning and always go to the history like I I tell the kids when they go to colleges tell if you really want to know um if you really want to excel in your career in whatever domain know the history of that domain where does it come from what happened in the beginning it it actually um works like magic once you know started I think that makes perfect sense and I love the fool with a tool is still a fool yes I love it well Benny junad and sarg joal thank you so much for joining me today and I might not have mentioned that you both are members of our uh Cube Collective family of Industry analysts and strategists and thought leaders and we are so happy to have you as part of that community and this is a topic that I am sure we will be talking on for a long time to come but thank you so much for joining me today thank you Shelly thanks sh appreciate it thanks p
2024-02-22 07:54
