Bridging the AI Skills Gap

Imagine your company just invested in a cutting-edge AI tool, hoping to turbocharge productivity – but a few months in, hardly anyone on your team is using it.

Sound familiar?

Many business leaders face this exact challenge.

The promise of AI is real, yet adoption stalls because of a growing skills gap and even outright resistance from employees. In fact, recent studies confirm what you might suspect: lack of AI skills is now seen as the number-one barrier to adoption, with 62% of organizations citing a shortage of expertise as a significant hurdle​.

At the same time, employees are often anxious about AI’s impact on their jobs – over three-quarters of workers worry that AI could lead to job losses​

This mix of insufficient know-how and fear of change can derail even the best AI initiatives. Business leaders not only need to invest in technology but also invest in their people’s confidence and capabilities to use that technology.

The challenge is clear: how do we bring our workforce along on the AI journey?

Don’t worry, I got you covered.

Feel free to forward this to your boss, I’d love to help your organization succeed in your AI initiatives. ⏩ ✉️

Bridging the AI Skills Gap

Building an AI-Ready Culture

AI adoption in companies is accelerating, but employees on the ground are struggling to keep up. There’s often a palpable gap between the rapid pace of AI advancements and what employees feel prepared to handle.

Many workers feel overwhelmed by constantly evolving tools and lack the training to use them effectively. Nearly seven in ten employees never use AI in their work, and only about one in ten use it weekly.

One primary reason for this usage gap is that employees haven’t received enough guidance or training. Only 15% of U.S. workers say their organization has communicated a clear AI strategy, and a mere 11% feel “very prepared” to use AI in their role.​

When people aren’t sure why or how to use new AI tools, it’s no surprise they stick to familiar routines. This lack of preparedness is widespread. Even though 75% of companies have now adopted some form of AI technology, just one-third of employees have received any AI-related training in the last year​

In other words, companies are rolling out AI faster than their teams can absorb it. The result? Employees feel left behind and anxious. They might even quietly resist AI projects, skipping the use of a new system or voicing doubts—not because they hate innovation but because they feel unready and unsupported. 

Corporate leaders risk underutilizing their AI investments when the workforce isn’t on board. Only about one in five digital transformation initiatives fully achieves its goals, often due to cultural and adoption issues (Source: Gallup). 

When employees aren’t empowered to use AI, expensive platforms and algorithms can become costly shelfware, delivering only a fraction of the promised productivity gains. In short, technology alone can’t transform your business; your people have to transform along with it.

Building an AI-Ready Culture: A Roadmap

So, how can you turn things around and make your organization truly AI-ready? The good news is that the obstacles we’ve described—the skills gap, employee anxiety, and underutilized tools—can be overcome with the right strategies. It starts with a shift in culture and mindset from the C-suite to the front lines. 

Leaders must actively bridge the gap through education, communication, and support. Leaders must bridge the AI skills gap to alleviate employee frustration and resistance. In practice, building an AI-ready culture means investing as much in your people as you do in technology. Here’s how to get started:

Invest in Upskilling and Continuous Learning

Make AI literacy a core competency across your organization. Provide training programs, workshops, and easy-to-access online courses to help employees at all levels build confidence with AI tools. This isn’t a one-time effort – encourage continuous learning as AI evolves.

Not only will this boost adoption, but it also pays off financially: developing your existing talent is far more cost-effective than hiring new experts (hiring a new worker can cost up to seven times more than upskilling an existing employee). Fortunately, your employees want to learn – 57% of workers say they want their company to provide AI training to grow their skills. By offering meaningful upskilling opportunities, you signal that AI is a priority and that every team member has a stake in this transformation.

Lead with Change Management and Clear Communication

Adopting AI is as much about people and processes as technology—combat resistance by involving employees early and communicating openly about your AI vision. Set a clear AI strategy and share it widely—what are you implementing and why? How will it make jobs easier or more interesting? When people understand the purpose behind the technology, it calms AI uncertainty and reduces fear. 

Addressing the elephant in the room—job security—is also crucial. Reassure your teams that AI is there to augment their work, not replace it. For example, highlight how automating tedious tasks frees up time for more creative, high-value work. Back up these assurances with action: offer reassignment or additional training for roles likely to change. 

Also, it empowers leadership and managers to champion change. When top executives and team leaders actively use AI tools and encourage their teams to try them, it sets the tone that AI is a trusted part of the workflow, not a fad. For instance, JPMorgan Chase recognized the importance of top-down support; one of its senior leaders announced that every new employee would receive prompt engineering training to prepare them for an AI-driven future.

By making AI knowledge an onboarding requirement, they send a powerful message that embracing AI is a core value of the company. Effective change management also means creating feedback loops – giving employees a voice to share their concerns and insights as you implement AI. This helps you identify stumbling blocks early and lets staff feel heard during the transition.

Foster a Hands-on, Inclusive AI Culture

To truly embed AI into your business DNA, encourage a culture of experimentation and inclusion. Make AI tools available to employees daily and encourage them to “play” with them in a low-pressure setting. 

One idea is to designate team-based AI champions or mentors—tech-savvy staff who can help their peers discover useful AI use cases and troubleshoot issues. Celebrate quick wins and share success stories. For example, if someone on the sales team uses an AI tool to automate part of a proposal and saves hours, highlight that achievement in your internal newsletter or meetings.

These stories make AI’s benefits concrete and relatable, turning skeptics into curious adopters. Integrating AI goals into performance metrics or incentives can also be wise, gently nudging teams to incorporate AI where it makes sense.

Remember to be inclusive in your approach: ensure training and tool access reach everyone, not just tech teams or a select few. (Today, many organizations have a bias where only specific roles get AI training – but success with AI requires broad participation.)

One thing I strongly suggest avoiding is an AI-only group or a Tiger Team. If only a small group gets skilled, you risk creating an AI “have and have-not” divide. Instead, strive for AI fluency across departments. This inclusive approach was echoed in a recent global workforce study, which found that empowering workers at all levels is key to unlocking AI’s full potential. When entry-level employees to senior managers have at least a baseline understanding of AI, your company can capitalize on collective intelligence and creativity augmented by these new tools.

You create an environment where AI can thrive by following this roadmap—upskilling your people, managing change thoughtfully, and nurturing an innovative culture. This transforms AI from intimidating into empowering. Employees who once felt overwhelmed or threatened by AI will start to feel curious and competent, especially as they see their skills grow and their workload shift to more rewarding tasks. The impact on the business is tangible. 

Companies that invest in their workforce’s AI readiness stand to maximize the productivity gains of their AI investments. Instead of half-used software licenses or stalled pilot projects, you’ll have teams actively leveraging AI to solve problems, make better decisions, and drive efficiency. In short, an AI-ready culture turns AI from a shiny new thing in the toolbelt into a natural extension of how work gets done.

AI Adoption isn’t just a Digital Transformation – it’s a People Transformation

Close the skills gap by empowering your employees, and watch resistance melt into enthusiasm. With the right culture in place, your organization can ride the AI wave confidently, ensuring that your people and your technology are working in sync to move the business forward.​

The companies that get this right will see higher ROI on their AI projects and a more engaged, future-ready workforce poised to innovate. In the age of AI, your competitive advantage will boil down to your team’s ability to adapt and excel alongside intelligent machines. By building an AI-ready culture today, you prepare your business – and your people – to thrive tomorrow.

• OpenAI Deep Research - I have a confession: I didn’t write today’s article…but neither did AI. We wrote it together. I created a prompt for how I wanted the article to look, what content I thought was necessary, and the format. Then, I used OpenAI Deep Research to draft the article. It was surprisingly good. It did some things that I usually forget to do, like bold sections for emphasis and gathering facts that reinforce my

• Apollo AI - Apollo is your customizable AI client, enabling private, local AI chats even without an internet connection and connecting to advanced models like DeepSeek through OpenRouter. With experimental support for running smaller LLMs on-device, Apollo ensures privacy and security without relying on external servers. For broader access, OpenRouter integration allows you to connect with nearly every AI model available, from open-source options like Meta Llama 3 to proprietary models like OpenAI’s GPT-4—just sign in at OpenRouter, paste your API key, and start chatting.

• Dreamina - Dreamina is an AI platform specializing in creating stunning posters, flyers, and logos. Simply enter prompt words to generate eye-catching images from the makers of Capcut.

They say a magician should never reveal their secrets…but I am not exactly a rule follower.

Here are a series of prompts that I used to create today’s article. I did the research and the drafting with AI but I helped in the planning and then I did all the editing. I trimmed extraneous information and added my insights and I served as a fact-checker but I wrote an article that would normally take me four or five hours in less than one.

Let me know if you can adapt this to your needs. Just reply to this email.

Brainstorming Prompt

I used this prompt with OpenAI’s Deep Research. But you can use this with the much more affordable Google Gemini 1.5 Pro with Deep Research, or the You.com.

Look for the most popular AI articles from the last two week on generative AI and then look at the content I produce on https://theaienterprise.io. This should be an overview of AI practical application fo business productivity to inform business leaders, at the manager level and up. Then make five suggestions on articles to write to generate a high performing article for my newsletter The Artificially Intelligent Enterprise. 

Writing Prompt

After reviewing the five articles that ChatGPT suggested I took the suggestion and the guidance of why it would perform well to reinforce the output and the tone.

Write the feature article, Building an AI-Ready Culture: Upskilling Your Workforce for the AI Era.
Summary: As AI tools proliferate, a major concern for business leaders is whether their people have the skills and mindset to take advantage. This topic zeroes in on the human side of AI adoption, which is extremely relevant right now. Articles from the World Economic Forum and others emphasize that to unlock AI’s value, leaders must guide their teams through unprecedented change and learning​. Make the style: conversational thought leadership. Use the PAS copyrighting framework - Introduction (Problem), Agitation (what it is today), Solution(Bridge on how to get there). 

Because Deep Research wasn’t available to my normal ChatGPT Teams account yet, I created a new account that has no training on my writing. Interestingly, this turned out pretty much in my style, since I pointed it to my existing content on the web.

This is amazing how good the content was, eventually, I expect I’ll type a brief for what I want the article to look like including my insights, and then let agentic AI either with Deep Research or another agentic framework with a reasoning model do the heavy lifting while I add the human touch.

One interesting benefit is that I asked that ChatGPT highlight key points in the style that breaks up the text, I normally do this manually but it did make some interesting choices in bolding text. I think it did, okay but could have been better.

Finally, ChatGPT Deep Research includes footnotes for all the references, and it uses the feature in Chrome and other browsers called Text Fragments. With Text Fragments, you can link to a specific section of text on a third-party website this allows you to create a URL that highlights and scrolls directly to the desired text.

I appreciate your support.