Federal workers ready to thrive in the age of AI

People make success possible

Change won’t happen overnight, but how can agencies start preparing their workforce for the world of AI? Here are recommendations for where to dive in:

1. Educate and energize. Don’t explore intelligent technologies in an IT bubble. Instead, start and nurture a conversation throughout the organization to raise awareness and help employees become conversant and curious. AI will bring significant change, so engage early with formal change management activities to engage the workforce and deliver “what’s in it for me?” messages. Emphasize how intelligent technologies can enable employees to achieve better results by elevating their skills to higher-value tasks. Convey the organization’s commitment to bringing employees on this journey as active participants. Share real-world examples of employees already exploring these skills across the federal government.

2. Focus on tasks, not jobs. Intelligent technology can accomplish a growing variety of tasks. Engage workforce in thinking through the specific tasks that they complete on a daily basis. Brainstorm together to identify strong candidates for automation and augmentation. This lens will also help to bring forward the more natural job clusters based on the tasks being performed, allowing AI effects to be more visible across jobs, groups and teams.
3. Co-create the road map. Embed the workforce into the planning process so that intelligent technologies become part of the organization’s culture, building skills while technology is being evaluated. Address how the tools and technologies will support day-to-day work, helping employees identify where they may need to broaden or sharpen their skills. Just as important, consider what is necessary to sustaining this new road map/culture. How can the work be reimagined to uncover opportunities? What are the roles and skills that will be required? How will humans and machines be organized and augment each other’s core strengths?
4. Incubate technology AND skills. Various federal agencies are already actively incubating intelligent technologies. Just as important is incubating the human skills that will be essential to training, tuning and working with those technologies. Much like babies and children, intelligent technologies thrive in stable environments where they can keep learning and improving. Work with your people to determine how best to provide that environment. While incubating technologies, identify and test the specific roles and skills that will be needed for their “care and feeding.”

Workers want to thrive. Are leaders prepared to engage them?

The federal C-suite needs to tackle workforce transformation together. Each business function may have different needs, and one “size” of training no longer fits all. What works for a subset of the IT workforce may not be appropriate for the finance function, and vice versa. The key is to engage the federal workforce early and often—ensuring that they are co-creators, and trainers, not merely “trainees,” in the government of the future.