In the dynamic world of business technology, we're witnessing a new era cautiously take shape: the implementation of generative AI in enterprises. It’s a nascent field, with a mere 17% of Fortune 500 companies reporting scalable implementations of generative AI (source: KPMG) despite ubiquitous low-stakes experiments. 

Amidst this exploratory phase, emerging research is pointing towards a fascinating trend: AI is seemingly acting as an equalizer in workforce development, bridging the skills gap between high and low performers.

“The skills leveling effect” in AI-embedded workplaces

Consider a recent study in an enterprise call center, where AI was deployed to assist customer support agents with suggested conversational guidance. The mean productivity gains across all agents of 14% was already notable, but what really caught our eye was the outsized impact on novice workers. Agents with just two months of experience, when assisted by generative AI, could perform immediately at a productivity level comparable to those with 6+ months of experience (source: Brynjolfsson et al., 2023).

This phenomenon isn’t confined to call centers alone. In the field of software development, a study by Peng et al. investigated GitHub Copilot's impact on developer productivity. In a randomized controlled trial, the authors found that while the AI treatment group generally outperformed developers without AI, the effect was especially pronounced among novice programmers (source: Peng et al., 2023).

This skills leveling was also replicated in management consulting. Consultants who performed poorly in initial assessments saw the greatest productivity improvements when using AI, achieving a 2.5x improvement compared to high performers (source: Dell'Acqua et al, 2023). 

An author of the final study directly notes the increasingly apparent trend of skills leveling in the literature. In his words, “Looking at these results, I do not think enough people are considering what it means when a technology raises all workers to the top tiers of performance. It may be like how it used to matter whether miners were good or bad at digging through rock… until the steam shovel was invented and now differences in digging ability do not matter anymore. AI is not quite at that level of change, but skill leveling is going to have a big impact.” (source: Ethan Mollick)

While AI labor shocks are concerning to many policymakers, private sector firms, and workers alike, I am cautiously optimistic about both the economic and social impacts like the author above.  Both early research and intuition suggests that high-paying knowledge work positions are most exposed to the latest generative AI technology. The speculative question I arrive at is this: How can AI act as an equity driver in these high-paying professions, creating access to job opportunities by bridging complexity and leveling performance?

Cybersecurity: a case study

The global cybersecurity field, with a severe labor shortage, particularly in the Global South, underscores the simultaneous opportunity for economic growth and equitable access. The World Bank reports a staggering 4 million vacancies worldwide (source: The World Bank). Additionally, this is a field where any kind of productivity, AI or human, cannot arrive fast enough since the annual costs of cybersecurity incidents amount to approximately 6% of global GDP (source: European Parliament).

With women making up just 25% of the global cybersecurity workforce, solving the gender gap goes hand in hand with solving the labor shortage. In order to accomplish this goal, targeted upskilling and reskilling programs are an essential part of the solution. There are a number of notable ongoing initiatives. In India, for instance, Microsoft partnered with the Data Security Council of India (DSCI) to launch CyberShikshaa, a free program for skilling female engineering graduates from small towns in the field of cybersecurity through four-month intensive trainings. Since 2018, CyberShikshaa enabled the training of more than 1,000 women in cybersecurity (source: The World Bank).

Generative AI, with its skill leveling potential, can play at least two roles in complementing ongoing efforts. The first role is on the job “last mile” training and integration. Much like the AI assistant tools featured in the call center paper above, AI holds potential to help newly hired female cybersecurity professionals move up the experience curve much faster with on the job suggestions for task completion and revision. This can change the ROI of hiring junior talent for cybersecurity firms and accelerate the closing of the gender gap. 

The second role for generative AI is accelerating learner progress in upskilling and reskilling programs. These programs, like many other education initiatives, struggle in adapting to heterogeneous levels of learners with unique and outsized gaps in knowledge. A holy grail in education technology for the past decades has been scaling a 1:1 tutoring model, with potentially two standard deviations worth of learning outcome improvements as the prize (source: Bloom, 1984). Can generative AI help realize this level of personalized learning and feedback at scale in professional learning domains?

Collaborate with us on responsible AI

There are multiple risks in employing AI at scale in workforce development. Severe underrepresentation of women and other groups in AI R&D presents risks to implementing the resulting product. At best, the products might not be as useful for those underrepresented groups. Resulting errors and inaccuracies may even hamper performance. 

There is also the risk of fairness as AI algorithms are further integrated into the hiring process, across resume screens and candidate assessment. These models are trained on existing hiring data, which carry traditional heuristics and patterns which are often biased against underrepresented groups. 

At Higher Bar AI, we are eager to contribute to the development of responsible AI alongside researchers and builders in the ecosystem. We commit ourselves to being part of the solution for enterprise AI that simultaneously drives growth and promotes equitable access. 

Are you an organization grappling with skills gaps & shortages? Are you leading reskilling or upskilling initiatives and interested in the potential of AI to accelerate your efforts? We’d love to hear from you and explore how we can work together.