CIOs must lead workforce transformation in AI era

Education is critical for AI workforce transformation

The AI workforce transformation is underway at Jabil, a global contract manufacturing firm based in St. Petersburg, Fla., with 140,000 employees in around 100 locations across 25 countries.

The AI transformation is another in a line of manufacturing industry movements, following the Industry 4.0 transformation and then the digital transformation, Yap said.

However, CIOs must be particularly careful in how they talk about AI because it's a "scary word" for Jabil's mostly blue-collar workforce, she said.

"We're telling them that transformation is going to be a disruption to your job," Yap said. "So, we are very careful about how we talk about transformation, by saying that this is going to empower you as our employee."

Jabil was the first company to sign a license for Microsoft Copilot and is piloting use cases to test the value of AI, she said. These include using AI to augment and improve quality inspection in the manufacturing process; machine learning-based data analytics for financial, supply chain and demand forecasting; and generative AI and agentic AI in various productivity use cases. 

The giant global business services provider Deloitte is also investing in AI to help its employees improve productivity, Fruda said. The company recognizes that it needs to educate the workforce on how they can best use AI.

"AI is no different than any other tool that's out there," he said. "If we don't teach people how to take advantage and use the tool, it's no different than if you gave me a chisel, a hammer and a piece of marble and said, 'create something.' The results probably wouldn't be something that you'd want to buy, much less even look at."

Deloitte is investing in AI education for its workforce at the company's leadership development facility in Dallas, known as "Deloitte University," Fruda said.

"We're taking some of the AI agents and embedding them in the connected campus that we're creating and then doing agentic training and education for people, so they know what tools to use for what purpose," he said.

Get everyone on the same AI page

The major issue with the AI transformation for the City of Detroit is ensuring that everyone is talking about the same thing, Thompson said, particularly as city IT must serve both residents and employees and staff.

"I have to make sure that I'm educating my residents as well as my employees and staff," he said. "A lot of that is creating guidelines and establishing boundaries, I don't want personal, private information entered into ChatGPT."

Thompson wants people to use AI tools if they increase productivity, but there needs to be a balance in how fast things move.

"I want people more experienced and doing more with AI," he said. "But I fear that the more I roll out AI tools, if I do this too fast, I'll leave my employees and residents behind."

With so many types of AI out there now, one of the biggest challenges to setting an AI strategy is determining what's best to use for what Deloitte wants to do, Fruda said. The company doesn't want to lag behind as AI rapidly evolves, but employees may be left behind if new technologies are adopted too fast and without proper education.

"Creating the learning to educate and explain to people how they can use it to be more productive in the way that they're working and support their clients better is a big part of it," he said. "Some of the long vision is to wait to see what's coming, but you can't put your head in the sand and assume that somebody else is going to figure it out. You have to get your hands on it to see what it does."

AI strategy at Deloitte is being driven holistically at the whole firm level, because the enterprise's operations are siloed in the geographies outside of the U.S., Fruda said.

CIOs take a more strategic organizational role

CIOs are seeing their roles change with the AI wave, and they must take a strategic place in their organizations, the panelists said.

Thompson explained that his job at the City of Detroit has undergone significant changes in the five years since the COVID-19 pandemic, resulting in a shift from almost all in-office work to 80% remote work.

Previously, the CIO role was more about being a technology ambassador who would find ways for technology to align with the organization's strategic plans, he said.

"But AI has now turned my job into an accelerator," Thompson said. "I have everyone coming to me with ideas, so I have to [funnel these] where I tell people that this will work, so let's go this route or hold on we're not ready for that."

Thompson added that IT is being brought to the table more in high-level discussions, and AI has helped accelerate this trend.

Prior to the current AI transformation, the CIO's responsibilities were primarily focused on business enablement and ensuring that technologies, such as devices and networks, were functioning properly, Fruda said. However, the CIO is now sitting at the table with business leaders to help them understand the technological direction and its impact.

"The role is not just to be siloed and looking at the day-to-day operations of the business," he said. "It's a portion of what we do now, but we have that forward view and being in the room where the discussions are happening is critical nowadays."

Yap has regular discussions with the board at Jabil, which has positioned IT strategically within the company. As part of this, she sits with leaders from all parts of the company to understand issues such as the business problems faced by business leaders or the supply chain bottlenecks the CTO must address.

CIOs have to break out from the old CIO framework and prove that they are that business leader.

"IT is the glue of the company, because nobody else has the perspective of what everyone else is doing," she said. "CIOs have to break out from the old CIO framework and prove that they are that business leader."

Workforce changes are inevitable

Ultimately, the AI transformation will change the workforce, but exactly how is still to be determined.

The hope is that AI will add more value to Deloitte's clients and within the enterprise for employees as well, Fruda said.

"There are some positions that might not make that transition, and we have to figure out what to do with those individuals," he said. "It could be that there's something else that they need to focus on, but it's just the inevitable fact that AI is going to change some roles."

Technology is becoming more critical in all organizations, not just the city, Thompson said. For example, in Detroit, all the Big Three automakers have gone from being manufacturing companies to technology companies.

"As a city, it's going to be important for us to be faster, more rapid and put more emphasis on technology," he said. "But then the problem for government will be the need for a lot more cybersecurity, and we're going to have to be held more accountable for technology mishaps."

Predicting what may happen with AI in five years is difficult, but it's more realistic to focus on what will happen in the next year or two, Yap said. AI will likely be integrated into tools that employees need to learn how to use.

"The expectation from everybody in the organization is that it needs to be very agile and answers need to come immediately," she said. "We need to work in an environment that doesn't tolerate slowness, so we need to depend on AI to generate a lot of quick inputs."

Jim O'Donnell is a news director for Informa TechTarget who covers ERP and other enterprise applications.