When seniors graduate in University of Arizona The former was booed Google Every time the CEO mentioned AI, the sarcasm bothered the billionaire but failed to sway his conviction about the technology.
“The question is not whether AI will shape the world. It will.” Eric Schmidt He said in a Commencement speech Friday (May 15). “The question is whether you will help shape artificial intelligence.”
His certainty crossed a big question. What are companies doing to train current and future employees on technology that Schmidt declared “will touch every profession, every classroom, every hospital, every laboratory, every person, and every relationship you have”?
It seems that the answer is not enough.
April PYMNTS INTELLIGENCE He studies, “Wage to Wallet™ Index – Resilience Deficit: Workers in the Automated Economy“It showed that nearly half of U.S. workers in paid or higher-wage roles received no on-the-job training on how to use AI tools, new technologies, or automated processes in their roles in the past 12 months.
College graduates know how to use it ChatGPT To write articles and Google twin‘s Nano banana to generate and edit images, but very few workers receive very little guidance on how to use the technological tools that increasingly penetrate the workplace.
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The report found that 48% of U.S. workers who work in educated, higher-paying professional jobs, usually salaried, go to work every day and encounter AI tools that they are not prepared to use effectively. These people, including engineers, designers, lawyers, doctors, product managers, managers and the like, are the counterpart to what PYMNTS calls Intelligence Labor economics. This term refers to warehouse associates, delivery drivers, restaurant and hotel employees, caregivers, construction workers, janitors and the like, who typically earn no more than $25 per hour or less than $50,000 per year. They’re jobs that people don’t typically pursue with a four-year college degree.
“The machines.” They are coming‘
In both groups, most workers said that AI did not fundamentally change their daily roles. yet.
May PYMNTS Intelligence Report,Financial services are ahead in the enterprise AI race“It revealed that companies are rapidly introducing AI into their workflow and operations.
Financial services companies have expanded AI across nearly three times as many tasks as healthcare companies, with a focus on deploying it in back-office functions such as revenue recognition, credit risk assessment and sales forecasting, the report said. Healthcare is deploying AI through chatbots for customer service. Media and advertising companies are using AI to ensure quality content, prepare executive and board briefings, and improve logistics.
With 75 tasks spanning marketing and sales, supply chain, data and technology, product and customer experience, risk and compliance, corporate and strategy, HR and workforce, and payments and finance, financial services companies use AI in 27 tasks, media and advertising in 16 tasks, and healthcare in 10 tasks, according to the report.
“There’s a fear in your generation… of machines coming, of jobs evaporating,” Schmidt said, blaming fear-mongering on social media (rather than sensationalized corporate news about AI-driven workforce reductions, such as… roadblockAnnouncing that technology was the reason for reducing the number to 4,000 Jobsapproximately 40% of its workforce). February reconnaissance by Pew Research It found that 35% of workers with a bachelor’s degree said they believe AI will reduce their job opportunities in the future. The percentage of workers with a graduate degree who said they felt the same way was 24%.
Schmidt added, “We don’t know the exact contours of what this transformation will look like” and that “it will require each of us to adapt in ways we cannot anticipate.”
In other words, tomorrow’s educated consumers, and the companies that sell to them, should get used to radical uncertainty, at least for now. Employers are still figuring out how AI will shape their operations. In the end, workers can either join the ship or not.
Chitra spellsis a consultant to venture capital and private equity backed companies and previously Deutsche Bank One executive said she sees a growing disconnect between what workers are being told about AI-led change and what is cutting jobs and occupational risks right now.
“In the context of a large company, the impact is now microscopic,” she said in an interview. “A chatbot does not replace the sales process. It does not negotiate contracts. All of these companies have thousands of people and a maturity curve for every product, service line and function.”
That’s why she said she’s looking at Block’s CEO Jack DorseyAmazon’s recent ad crediting artificial intelligence, not over-hiring, for downsizing workers is misleading but a “fast and popular narrative” among corporate executives.
The better question isn’t about determining how many jobs AI will replace, Noubat said. Instead, it is about the new jobs that will emerge across industries, products and services.
“Knowledge will be needed to adopt and use this technology,” she said.
“If you don’t care about science, that’s OK because AI will touch everything else too…The question is whether you will help shape AI,” Schmidt said.
But if training produces the knowledge needed to shape AI into the workforce, companies still have a lot of work to do.
Atlanta branch Federal Reserve he said in March Worksheet “The near-term labor market impacts of AI are characterized less by overall job losses and more by task shifts and occupational exposure among workers.” But she also pointed to a “lack of workforce training.”
PYMNTS survey data from April showed that 53% of gig economy workers are confident they could find similar-paying work if technology eliminated their roles. That’s nearly half the group of millions of workers who feel they can’t. As technology improves, 74% said they believe their skills will continue to be valuable. But what workers and employers believe are two different things, especially with the lag in on-the-job training.
Likewise, if messaging produces desired attitudes in the new workforce, AI advocates like Schmidt and companies still have a lot of work to do. according to Stanford University2026 Artificial Intelligence Index Report“AI experts and the public have very different views about the future of the technology.”
“When someone offers you a seat on a rocket ship, you don’t ask which seat. You just sit,” Schmidt said to boos. “Graduates, the rocket ship is here.”
Training employees how to fly the rocket vehicle is the next challenge.
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