Dive Brief:
- A generational disconnect in the workplace threatens to disrupt enterprise plans for generative AI adoption, according to a Dice report released last week. The tech job marketplace surveyed 520 U.S. technology professionals in June for its Q2 Technology Professionals Sentiment report.
- Two in five tech workers aged 18 to 24 say they are using generative AI on the job at least once a week. By contrast, nearly half of tech professionals aged 55 or older say they don’t use the technology at all.
- The technology has yet to deliver transformational results early hype promised. More than half of survey respondents said AI use has only had a slight impact on their work. More than half of survey respondents said AI only slighted impacted their work.
Dive Insight:
A gap in how different age groups leverage a technology can impede adoption efforts. With generative AI, the risk is compounded by the technology’s potential to transform entire work processes and roles.
Younger technologists were quick to leverage generative AI tools like ChatGPT; workers under 30 years old were more likely than their older counterparts to use the tool at work, according to Pew data.
Technologists of different age groups hold disparate views on generative AI’s impact on their careers. IT admins aged 34 years old or younger are more concerned about their professional prospects than workers who are 45 and older, according to a February JumpCloud report.
As adoption plans advance, enterprise use of the technology is informing talent attraction and retention strategies. Over 4 in 5 HR professionals told Dice they expect to see higher demand for AI professionals in the coming six months.
For some businesses, meeting their AI talent requirements will largely depend on upskilling existing staff. Technology providers have opened up training curriculums and launched free programs to grow the pool of available, qualified technologists.
Professional services firms, including PwC, rolled out vast AI adoption roadmaps that included employee training from the start.
“One of the very first things we recognized was that, if we don’t get the people part right, you could potentially have a lot of big investments coming up very short,” said Dan Priest, chief AI officer at PwC US, during a CIO Dive virtual event in August.
But challenges await enterprise upskilling plans, too. The vast majority of companies lack clarity into the existing levels of AI proficiency among their existing staff, making it harder to lay out efficient upskilling strategies, PluralSight found.