As Artificial Intelligence transforms the workplace, organisations must look beyond technology investment and focus on developing the skills, confidence and culture needed to realise its full potential. Martin Bradbury, Regional Vice President UKI, Dynatrace, tells us why continuous learning, critical thinking and mentorship are essential to preparing employees for an AI-driven future and ensuring businesses achieve lasting value from their technology investments.
AI is changing the workplace at an extraordinary speed, but the biggest challenge facing businesses now has shifted from how quickly they can adopt the technology, to whether their people are ready to make the most of it.
According to a recent McKinsey study, 28% of respondents say their organisations are spending more than 10% of their total enterprise-wide budget for information and communication technology on AI. Yet access to the latest platforms and models will only take them so far. Without the right skills and knowledge across the entire workforce, organisations will struggle to translate that investment into impact.
People before platform
For leaders, this changes what AI readiness looks like in practice. It isn’t about turning every employee into an AI specialist, but about ensuring people understand how these tools can support their work and where their limitations lie.
That requires more than technical training. Employees need the confidence to experiment with new tools and learn how they can be applied to their own roles. They also need an environment where trying something new is actively encouraged and sharing what they learn is a key part of how teams work.
Experience has taught me that creating that environment requires organisations to think about culture and technology together. As businesses grow, the way people work, learn and collaborate needs to evolve with them. Transformation rarely has a fixed endpoint, particularly when the technology itself is developing so rapidly. Therefore, organisations need to be prepared to learn and adapt as both their workforce and the environment around them change.
AI makes that approach even more relevant. The technology is developing far too quickly for businesses to assume that a single training programme will prepare their workforce for what comes next. Instead, leaders need to bake continuous learning into the organisation itself to build employees’ confidence.
Keeping skills moving with technology
Upskilling has traditionally been treated as something that happens at particular points in an employee’s career, but that approach is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain when the tools they are using change by the day.
Organisations need to give employees regular opportunities to develop their skills and, importantly, to apply what they learn. A recent UK study revealed that 84% of people in work have not undertaken any AI-related training in the past 12 months. Of course, formal training matters, but so do the less structured ways that knowledge moves through a business. Colleagues sharing what has worked for them, teams discussing where new tools have not worked so well and leaders being open about what they are still learning can all help an organisation build capabilities more quickly.
Career development needs to be considered in the same way. Giving employees greater visibility into potential career paths, opportunities to side-step into new roles internally and access to training and mentorship across the organisation can all help people take greater ownership of their progression. Of course, businesses cannot predict precisely which skills every role will require several years from now, so they need to make it easier for people to keep building new ones.
Making room for human judgement
Giving employees the opportunity to explore AI also allows them to better understand when not to rely on the technology. We’re increasingly learning that an AI output that sounds convincing is not necessarily an output that should be acted upon without scrutiny.
Critical thinking therefore needs to develop alongside technical capability. Employees should learn how to question an AI-generated answer and test it against what they know. The more AI becomes part of everyday workflows, the more important that human judgement becomes.
This is also why culture cannot be separated from technology adoption. Shared principles around how people work, make decisions and interact with colleagues provide an important foundation, particularly when the tools informing those decisions are changing all the time.
Building capability beyond the organisation
Investment in people has implications beyond the workforce itself. Competitive advantage increasingly depends on how effectively businesses can work with partners and customers too.
Companies with more skilled workforces become much more attractive organisations to work with. Partners want to collaborate with teams that can ultimately find better ways to solve customer problems and so building internal capability can therefore strengthen the ecosystem around a business as well as the internal organisation itself.
That takes time. However, investing seriously in people alongside technology puts businesses in a stronger position to help their customers navigate change and get more value from their technology investments.
Mentor through change
The same long-term thinking needs to extend into how we invest in leadership development. Boardrooms will always need to focus on immediate revenue, growth and margins, but leaders also have a responsibility to build organisations that can perform and thrive beyond the next quarter.
Mentorship is a critical part of that, particularly during periods of significant technological change. Employees are being asked to learn new tools, change established ways of working and develop new skills that would not have been part of their roles a few years ago – which is understandably difficult. Having access to someone who can share their experience and offer perspective can make that transition easier to navigate.
Thinking about how we develop the next generation of leaders is also an important part of the process. Mentoring can give people opportunities to build confidence and learn from those who have already navigated periods of significant change. This is something I have seen make a real difference in my own career.
Mentorship also does not have to mean knowledge travelling in one direction. Experienced leaders can offer context developed over many years, while employees earlier in their careers may bring different perspectives and greater familiarity with emerging technologies. Both have something to learn from the other, and done well, it creates a cycle in which people who have benefited from guidance are more likely to provide it to others.
Preparing people for what comes next
There is ultimately no way for organisations to know exactly how AI will reshape the workplace over the next few years, but what they can control is how well prepared their people are to respond.
Indeed, AI investment will continue to grow, but spending alone is a poor measure of readiness. The more meaningful test is whether an organisation has people who know how to use the technology effectively, when to challenge it and how to keep developing as its capabilities change.
For leaders, that requires the same level of attention to people and culture that they already give to platforms and infrastructure. Technology will keep moving. But the organisations best positioned to move with it will be those that make developing their people a continuous part of how they operate.
