Workforce Upskilling for the AI Era

This InfoBrief draws upon primary survey research from IDC to explore key challenges and requirements for companies as they better prepare their workers to succeed in an era of AI-enabled businesses.

• As businesses face ongoing challenges to find top talent and rely increasingly on AI and generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) to augment their workforce, they must consider key areas of upskilling and cross-skilling, and the technologies to fully equip employees securely, simply and at scale. This approach enables organizations achieve goals for productivity and growth.
• To broadly attract and keep employees, organizations need to offer hardware, software and services that deliver a parity of experience for workers across remote, field and on-site locations. This requires laptops and other hardware devices to be purpose-built for secure support of AI-enabled work practices.
• AI and GenAI solutions inform new approaches to drive productivity and support employee upskilling and cross-skilling. They are also driving deeper dependencies between hardware and software in a way that will be foundational for defining transformational work practices