The AI Skills Gap: What It Really Takes to Bring a Workforce on the Journey

0:01Welcome to Data and AI Mastery, the podcast where we sit down with the data and AI leaders shaping the future of business. I'm your host, Raoul-Gabriel Urma. Today, we're doing something a little different. One of the things I love about hosting this show is what happens when you step back from the individual conversations and look at the bigger picture. Themes keep coming back across different industries and companies, no matter what stage of the AI journey they find themselves on. This episode is built around one of those themes. Today, we're focusing on people, specifically data and AI skills.

0:41Because if there's one thing that has come up in almost every conversation this year, it's this. The technology is the easy part. Getting people ready for it, that's the hard part. You are going to hear from Jessica Rusu, Chief Data, Information and Intelligence Officer at the Financial Conduct Authority. From Nick Edwards and Harjohal Adi AA, who are on one of the most impressive AI transformation journeys I've come across. And from senior data and AI leaders at organizations including Aviva, Santander UK, Oxford Said Business School and TransUnion. union. I think what they have to say about curiosity, about fear and about what it actually takes to bring a workforce on an air journey will really resonate with you.

1:25Let's get into it.

1:31There's the obvious things of people who, you know, got a level of courage, they've got hard work ethic. But I think the quality that always stands for me is the curiosity one people who always want to pull on that string to think but what if this or what if that so they don't take the answer straight away they'll go away they'll inquire they'll play they'll be curious with it and I think with AI that's the sort of mindsets we want because it's not a technology that's been around readily for 10 20 years so you can use it and make advantage very quickly if you've got the hunger and desire and the curiosity to really want to do that so that's what we're really saying to people you know we've been delighted with the work with Cambridge Spark and the transformation we're doing with all our senior leaders and I was at you know cohort one at Cambridge only last week and in the four months from the two visits the amount of progression our cohorts had made was phenomenal and to see some of the presentations I shared it with the executive team at our weekly meeting last week I was blown away with how far people had come in informants in their thinking and they were doing demos of live activity you know with informants and I spoke to them at the end of the day and said a bit you know some of you probably shocked yourselves by how far you've come and they were yeah yes but I could see that there was a real belief and confidence in in what we'd work partly with you yourselves and your organization that if informants you can achieve that much while people are still doing the day job imagine when you really create this center of excellence in Nick's world and really get the technology flowing into the whole business what the potential could be yeah 100 how does that make you feel nick because it feels like it's really special times yeah it does it's felt really good i mean um we we clocked really early on that this technology was going to be a little bit different the a.a has been through every wave of technology over the last 120 years right so you can imagine the the path this business has been on if you look back at our heritage it's fascinating we used to run this business with a whole bunch of cartographers building maps and all that sort of stuff very different business today but it became really clear to us like a year or so ago that although there was a desire a lot of our colleagues didn't quite know what to do and this AI you know you're being hit with every day new technologies emerging new models emerging so we really clocked for our leaders skills was going to be important like how do we get everybody to understand the way to reimagine the way we do things in the business so part of that was you know working with Cambridge Spark and building out a program for our leaders secondly tooling you know we had some choices to make on tooling for our colleagues and what we found really early on was that giving colleagues the tools they are using outside of work had a massively disproportionate effect if they could use the same tools inside of work so that's why we decided actually to to buy 1500 chat gpt enterprise licenses deploy them securely get all of the guard works the guard rails and frameworks right so that colleagues could use them safely with all of our connectors and confidential information but like that combination of giving everybody a set of skills giving them some space and time to work with colleagues they don't normally work with to practice skills in a safe way and then a bunch of tooling with some skills and upskilling how to use it as that like as hard said within four or five months we've just seen the water level rise across the organization really quickly into the space now we've got these cohorts i'm on cohort two we've got a bunch of colleagues on cohort three we've got 50 more use cases that have entered the system many of their way and many of them are going to make their way to production pretty shortly yeah

5:05it's a personal kind of angle i completely believe in the democratization of ai and it's certainly something that we've led with in aviva as well so why do i believe that that's probably a bit of a multifaceted answer is the truth firstly you can learn a lot from what's happened in the past So if I use the digital revolution, actually what we saw there was people who had access to the right capabilities, there's a socioeconomic advantage to that. So actually, you know, culturally, broadly, I think people having access to things which are fundamentally a power for good in their lives, which I believe AI is a force for good, that is helpful and valuable for human beings and for people in general.

5:52So there's kind of almost on that level, I believe it. I also think that it's incredibly important for culture in the organisation. There's so many headlines around about AI out there and some are true, some aren't, some are quite alarmist. I think the way to help people through that noise, and it's a lot, is to allow them to use things, to allow them to experience things and to know and understand what that means for them in their day-to-day life. If you keep it as a thing over there that only a select group of people are using, I think that adds to the fear, actually. I think that adds to the discomfort.

6:33Once you can see something yourself, once you can have a go at using it yourself, all of a sudden you go, oh, okay, actually I get that now. I can see why that's sensible. So that's sort of almost the second bit. And then the third bit is probably actually a bit more tied to the kind of commercial benefits, maybe. I have never seen any kind of technology that you need to use. You know, this is so almost humanistic in kind of how you chat to it. What I have found with just about everybody is they all have a hard moment when they get involved and they use it. and then they start to become more effective and you start to see people welcoming actually the capability into their day-to-day roles and I think if you don't do that that's the commercial angle of it actually your people will resist so if you can so if you try to do something really brilliant across the beaver it's a great customer outcome it's a brilliant project it's going to save time it's going to save money it's delivering a better outcome if people feel scared about it then you will have, I tend to say organ rejection, whether it's good or not, if they're scared of it, they'll just go, I don't want it, I don't want it.

7:42So you have to drive that kind of culture and that adoption and that sort of natural curiosity to actually get some of the commercial business benefits, as well as thinking about the sort of broader societal picture.

8:00it's a daily challenge opportunity privilege well it's uh and and the honest answer is you you can't you can't get your arms around all of it because of the pace it's changing and because of the breadth of use cases scenarios personas customers stakeholders that exist it's not physically possible and you shouldn't beat yourself up thinking that you have to and you can't uh you know i'm i'm quite honest with my the school's leadership team executive board my senior management team my team i don't know the answer to everything i can't tell you what the landscape of technology is going to look like next year you gave a fantastic example of chat gpt 3.5 to think I think it was 5.4 this week you know that pace of change has happened over over 12 18 months so these are the lots of people will say it and you will have heard it many times these are truly unprecedented times it's a bit like a roller coaster white knuckle right you've got to get in you've got to go with it and you've got to hang on how do I influence that part of that is just expressing a clear journey and to all of those stakeholders setting out what that north star looks like what the art of the possible is getting people the confidence and the assurance that it's okay and it's safe and it's secure to use these tools and then as we've touched on making sure we're following through by providing the the digital skills to leverage exploit and use them properly and and i think that i think that's the art of it you know it's almost adoption by influence It's creating a climate where people understand what the purpose is and where we want to get to.

9:45Why make these changes? And then creating a culture of FOMO, fear of missing out. I want to use these tools because these other departments are doing great things with them and delivering great benefits. So it's a combination of all of those.

10:03So I think at the moment, I sort of feel, again, if I talk about AI, the conversation is you've got people who want to get involved in it and and can't get involved in it so i would make it accessible to everyone um i know that's not always easy uh the other bit that i would try and remove we've had a magic wand is is fear of ai so i i have a very positive outlook that i think the people who have expertise and they're the ones who who run our business and they run it every day and they're sitting in the branches they know more about products than probably everyone the people who are sitting you know within this in in the kind of central functions who really know how banking works that is the expertise that we need in the future they don't need to worry about ai so i think ai is is the bit at the moment which i think a lot of people are saying oh it's coming for our jobs it's it's gonna i i completely disregard that i think this is going to make people's jobs much better i think they're gonna have ai as a kind of the energy boost that they need which will stop them having to do the low value stuff and we will accelerate all of the value add so to remove the fear of ai would be my my magic one

11:14yeah this is tricky isn't it because uh well i actually have um two teenagers so i will be helping them you know hopefully uh navigate that part of their life as well and i think it's a it's a tricky time but the best advice that that I can give anyone is to um to think about both your vertical skill set as well as your horizontal skill set sometimes it's called your t skills can you tell us more about it yeah so if you think about what is your domain specialism so for mine it was analytics data science technology right so those are your kind of vertical skills. But if I think about the different moves that I made throughout my career, switching sectors, industries, and also some of the board opportunities, you add this kind of horizontal set of skills that could be risk, finance, audit.

12:18You know, it could be HR, it could be strategy, it could be marketing. So you sort of think about what are those broadening skills and every time that I move, maybe from the automotive industry or into e-commerce or into banking or finance or fintech or government, every time you move, you add another kind of string to your bow. And so I would tell anyone who's preparing for the future, no one can predict the future. But the best thing that you can do is, you know, have your vertical domain expertise, but then always think about what can you do to expand your profile, to give yourself more flexibility.

13:01Maybe it's taking an international assignment or making a move that might seem a little unconventional, you know, switch industries, switch firms. And that switching will just give give you a lot more depth and breadth as a person and then make you hopefully ready for whatever it is to come

13:25can you walk us through in your view how important is it to to upskill and what was your experience like yeah absolutely and that's a topic which um comes up every day that you know what i learned i think it was about five or so years ago now um the world has changed so much so the foundation stayed the same but gen ai have i have really took off um since then so it's important to keep up up to date both myself personally so you know attending conferences listening to other colleagues reading publications podcasts etc but equally well my team how can i ring fans time for them to stay up to date because otherwise there becomes a job a time when they won't be able to do their job equally well the needs of the business evolved so it's important that the teams will continue to learn and adopt to try new techniques and equal all four damage.

14:17My teams feel very excited. One of the attributes to award-winning team is that satiation, unsatiable satiation to keep learning right so that that needs to keep understanding and learning and trying new things is one characteristic that I've observed of high-performing teams. In terms of my own personal experience I say that having done the apprenticeship was a very powerful experience to not just go into theory, but also help me to apply the theory to practice. And that was very fruitful to the organization that helped me to do the apprenticeship. Like together with other people, we set up a whole department through the algorithms that we developed as part of the apprenticeship scheme.

14:59It was a risky project. So I think if it wasn't for Cambridge Park to help me read the apprenticeship scheme of that project, that project would have never got off the ground because it was high risk, high reward. But here we are now, we can talk about the success of the story. So it's important for people, I'd say, to keep an open mind, invest in themselves. It is not easy. Obviously, if people are working and learning, it does take a bit of input, but it does pay back big dividends. yeah and you won the uh apprentice of the year award with a bcs the british computer society so i mean phenomenal phenomenal result kevin yeah thank you and i think you are with me on that day you remember the surprise on my face and that surprise comes in because i did this because i enjoy the job right and that's the message that i give to people make sure that you enjoy what you do and if you enjoy what you do the rest will fall in place right so I always described that my hobby and my job became the same thing and you know I enjoy what I do and that would drive would strive the passion to learn to adopt to try new things so that's the key success for me personally to have invested so heavily in my career.

16:13We think upskilling equals always learning in the traditional way of learning. So when I think of learning, I always think of the mandatory training courses I need to go through, and it's not exactly appealing, right, to the majority of the, let's say, of the workforce. Especially right now in 2025, and our attention span basically is reduced to 30-second reels, right, as we are scrolling through with our mobile. And it's like, that's kind of the consumptions that we are expecting. So like a TikTok reel or Instagram reel. So I think you need to bring learning and upskilling to the 21st century and to the year 2024, almost 2026.

16:50So kind of adapt this learning path. So it's not the traditional classroom learning, you know, and it's like that's kind of probably perceived as not so super attractive. You need to give people an experience. I think what really gets stuck when we run, you know, certain events is like if people feel that this is an experience, you know, where they cannot only learn, but actually they emotionally connect to this. They have way better takeaways and the impact that you create is way bigger. So obviously running events like hackathons and onsite challenges is more resourceful and more costly. It's like it doesn't allow you to scale as like, for instance, with online events or videos.

17:31But I think it's a combination of those two things. So I think it's really the onsite experience where people connect, there's an emotional connection. You know, you have some gamified experiences. I think that always works really well. And you see those light bulb moments and you can interact with those people when they have those light bulb moments. So I think this really creates some spark. But you can also really take it to online, right? So you have different kind of videos. Let people share, let people brag about what they build and what they achieve with it. Just don't think learning is like top down from, you know, learning team, you know, to the rest of the workforce.

18:09It's like people share the experience. are, right? What's working really well on social media is people are bragging. People are bragging about the holidays, you know, about the food that they're eating. People brag about the custom GPT that they have built. I see. It's like, let me, right, give them a platform, you know, no judge, you know, not being judgmental, you know, just let them brag about it. Let's say, this is what I've done, this is what I've built, this is the impact that I've created, and here I am to share it with you and I give you access to this. So give them the space as well, you know, this platform to share this.

18:39And this kind of community feeling, you know, I think this building is emotional connection as well and saying, you're doing something great right now. You're building something, you're part of an amazing journey and we're all in it together. So this kind of feeling of a community, this definitely helps, you know, as well to spark interest. So I think it's a different combination of different kind of tools and platforms that work. But I think emotional connection is definitely one of them and experience.

19:13Let me start out by saying that I have a 17-year-old son, and I'm trying to encourage him to get into technology and go to a university and do a degree and all these sorts of things. But really, in my heart of hearts, I am not sure whether I want him to do a degree, because in three years, it will probably be obsolete. and the practical experience of being in a business I think is more important these days. Now I wouldn't tell him that because then it would be an excuse for him not to want to do a degree. And I say that because when I recruit people are saying, no, I have a degree in this. I don't think those things are really important anymore.

19:54What I look for in people is curiosity. Work ethic. Curiosity. diversity, multiple different interests in how they think about a problem. I think, you know, that's really important, right? The next thing which I think is important is having people skill, the ability to collaborate, have a conversation, understand each other and find solutions for the business. I think I look for people like that. Now, you can't really judge a lot of that stuff in an interview, right? It's quite hard. But, you know, when people can demonstrate that they are collaborative and the ability to find solutions, find a halfway ground, so to speak, I think are really important for me.

20:39That's what I look for. I don't look for qualifications if that's what you are going towards, because I don't think those things are relevant anymore. I like what you said that curiosity is an important attribute, especially with AI, where you get a bunch of stuff that may be right or may be wrong, so kind of questioning it and being curious. It's really important, but I think Steve Jobs said it in his Stanford address some many, many years ago, be curious, you know, whatever. And people just take that for just for the word that it is. But I always, I was saying this to my team the other day, actually, we're speaking about AI.

21:16And I was saying that if you are not curious, if you are not curious, you will be irrelevant. Because at the speed at which things are moving, and the amount of things that are happening around us, including myself, by the way, you would be irrelevant. So you have to be curious because everything you learn now in six months, it's gone. It's gone to something else, right? How are you going to keep ahead of the pack if you need to go to university every time? No, you've got to figure out better ways of learning. That's a wrap on today's episode. As you go away, ask yourself this, not what tools the organization is using, but whether your people are generally equipped and ready to use them.

21:58That, more than anything else, is what separates the organizations making real progress from the ones still waiting for it to happen. If what you've heard today has sparked reflections, then check out the full conversations to go much deeper. You will find links to every episode featured in the show notes. If you found this really useful, please do subscribe, as it means you'll never miss a future conversation with the leaders driving data and AI forward. And if you're enjoying the show, a review on Spotify or Apple podcast goes a long way. And finally, if you're a data and AI leader looking to build real capability across the organization, Cambridge Spark can help.

22:39Find out more at cambridgespark.com or connect with us on LinkedIn. Until next time, stay ahead, stay inspired, and stay masterful. Help!