Everyone from the CEO to the intern should be adopting an ‘AI-first' mindset to maximise the productivity gains of artificial intelligence.
Whether you’re managing your inbox or creating a strategy, the first question that pops to mind should be: ‘How can I use AI?’
If you can't answer that, you need to boost your AI skills, those who attended a recent Australian Industry Group webinar heard.
“Within the space of just a few years, AI skills have become far more than a niche technical specialty,” Caroline Smith, webinar host and Executive Director of our Centre for Education and Training (CET), said.
“They're increasingly required across the workforce and quickly becoming an essential foundational capability for many occupations.”
To explore what the AI uplift means for skills and capabilities across our workforce and how education and training systems need to respond, Dr Smith welcomed panellists:
▪️Tim Burt, Director of Strategy and Planning at Future Skills Organisation;
▪️Daswin de Silva, Professor of AI and Analytics, Discipline Lead and Co-Director of the La Trobe AI Institute at La Trobe University and
▪️Martin Ripple, CEO of global manufacturing and technology firm ANCA CNC Machines.
Human capabilities such as critical thinking, being able to adapt and continuous learning are fundamental to supporting AI adoption, panellists said.
“Demand for AI skills is growing rapidly,” Tim Burt, of Future Skills Organisation (a Federal Government-funded Jobs and Skills Council), said.
“Job postings requiring AI-related skills have almost doubled in the past three years.
“Pretty much every industry now is demanding AI-related skills.”
For most people, non-technical generalist skills — such as evaluating output and interpreting data — are enough, but even they’re evolving from ‘nice to have’ to fundamental.
Despite soaring demand for skills and a rapidly evolving AI landscape, the industry adoption of and appetite for AI is not as fast.
An ABS study has shown that while 56% of businesses are geared towards innovation, only 12% use AI tools, fellow panellist Daswin de Silva said.
“We saw similar figures in a National AI Centre study of small and medium enterprises: 44% are adopting, 37% aren’t and 9% aren’t sure.”
The key barriers to adoption of AI are mistrust, cost and skills.
Mr Burt said it’s crucial for employers to not only understand AI tools but to establish a framework around employees’ use of AI.
Steps include:
Deep collaboration between the education sector and industry is essential to identify gaps, opportunities and how AI can be used more effectively and responsibly.
“The current AI training landscape is overwhelming and only about a quarter of employers have provided AI-related training,” Mr Burt said.
“Most training is informal, non-accredited and designed and delivered by vendors.
“The gap or ‘missing middle’ we hear about is the need for contextualised workplace training that can help people turn AI capability into deployment within businesses.
“These skills are fundamental, but training efforts have not focused on that.
“Vocational education training (VET) has a massive opportunity here.”
The challenge for VET is the speed of development.
“This technology is changing much faster than accreditation cycles can keep up with,” Mr Burt said.
“How do we maintain the rigour of VET and the confidence of industry in the training product, while making it more responsive and flexible to the technology that’s changing so fast?
“And how do we support teachers and trainers to maintain their capability and currency with the technology that's so rapidly evolving?”
“There's no single fix: changes needed include a look at how we can fund shorter forms of training and boosting institutional capability to support trainers and educators to keep pace.
“We recognise there’s a significant opportunity for AI tools to speed up these processes themselves.
“We're piloting a number of processes to help with training product development and workforce analysis, as well as tools to support assessment and compliance requirements in registered training organisations.
“Ongoing engagement with industry to understand how AI tools are changing tasks and roles will be fundamental.
“We can't do this alone, which is why I'm grateful to be here with Australian Industry Group today,” Mr Burt said.
The tertiary sector also has a role in plugging the gap when it comes to AI training and skills adoption, fellow panellist Daswin de Silva said.
“The legacy for tertiary education — probably for VET education, too — is AI misconduct in assessments,” he added.
“The best way to address this is to bring AI into the curriculum and pedagogy.
“AI as a general-purpose technology, just like the computer or the internet was before, requires us to rethink all three of these elements (curriculum, pedagogy and assessment).
“Once you have AI-generated content, how do you transform that into something meaningful and actionable?
“The pedagogy looks at how students use AI to support their learning, and assessment needs to consider what counts as valid evidence of learning.
“Universities and VET have to get this right in time for the next generation of graduates who need to be AI-skilled for AI-centric workplaces.”
In a recent submission to a Senate inquiry on Australian university graduates, Australian Industry Group emphasised the importance of universities building AI literacy and engagement aligned to the way AI is being used in today’s workplaces.
Also last year, Australian Industry Group published a series of case studies on companies implementing AI across their businesses.
The report included ANCA CNC Machines, whose CEO, Martin Ripple, joined the webinar.
“We’ve approached AI aggressively in terms of implementing it as fast as we could,” Mr Ripple said.
“Our view was that if we waited for Outlook or Microsoft to integrate AI tools into their suites, which they have done in the meantime, then it's not differentiated against competitors. Rather, it’s an equaliser where everybody uses the same kind of tools.
“So, from the get-go, we’ve pushed fairly hard that AI literacy becomes a new baseline for our employees.”
An international manufacturer of CNC machines, ANCA is based in Melbourne, operates in more than 20 countries and has 1500 employees.
Founded 52 years ago, it produces the tools that make products for brands including Apple, BYD, Tesla, SpaceX, Airbus and Boeing.
“The change that comes with artificial intelligence is fundamental and will affect everyone: their jobs, roles and tasks,” Mr Ripple said.
“Everybody has an obligation to look into what these tools can do in developing workflows and agentic solutions to problems; AI proficiency is not the role of IT.
“From an ANCA perspective, we’ve seen incredible productivity gains of individuals embracing certain AI tools.”
“We started by organising what we call ‘hackathons’ to work on tricky problems with AI: problems we thought we couldn't solve or had trouble solving internally,” Mr Ripple said.
“We quickly learned AI is comfortable with chaos. You could throw any database, structure or duplication at it, and it would figure out what's relevant in seconds.”
ANCA then built an AI assistant for its intranet, giving it access to all company data: from travel policies to manuals, technical descriptions and drawings.
“It has a very high rate of use, and questions from employees have become increasingly complicated and technical,” Mr Ripple said.
Developing clones — virtual employees — for recurring tasks was the next step.
“We’ve got a number of clones, including one for myself,” Mr Ripple said.
“I developed a CEO clone that reads my emails and is aware of many other things happening in the organisation.
“I wouldn't be able to be across as many subjects as the clone is.
“A clone that sits inside the project management office can digest information, including external emails, in real time and can state whether projects are on schedule or not."
The human employee remains ultimately accountable for the results.
“You can't transfer that on to a virtual employee,” Mr Ripple said.
Change is hard, and fast change is even harder.
“This is an incredibly fast change and can be difficult to accept for somebody who has comfortably done a job a certain way for 20 years,” Mr Ripple said.
“The skill of being able to change or reflect on your own way of working is vital.
“You could argue that if you're still writing emails, you haven't adopted AI in your personal life quite yet, because there's no need to write emails anymore, right?
“There's also no need to put presentations together yourself, or at least 95% of the work. The same counts for most tasks.
“Before AI, I always wondered: ‘Who is the master, and who is the slave?’
“When it came to my inbox, I always felt the computer was the master, and I was the slave.
“Now, it’s the other way around: the human becomes the master, and IT is the slave — because it does make your life easier.
“That’s why the willingness to adopt technology is so important.”
Mr Burt advised: “If you’re new to AI, start by using it in a safe and low-risk manner.
“Work with your employer to think about the task and where AI feeds into it.”
Latrobe calls it an AI-first mindset.
“It’s literally a workforce multiplier,” Mr de Silva said.
“Whatever task you’re performing at work, you should ask: ‘How can I use AI?’
“It should be the first question that pops to mind, and if you can't answer this, then you need to build up your AI skills and literacy.”
“AI works best when it's built into how people already do their jobs, with humans still making judgment calls,” Mr Burt said.
“Where it fails is when it's regarded as an IT issue or bolt-on.
“Getting all of that right and maintaining your quality and trust with customers and employees is where the rubber hits the road.”
Wendy Larter is Communications Manager at Australian Industry Group.
A former journalist for newspapers and magazines including The Courier-Mail in Brisbane and Metro, the News of the World, The Times and Elle in the UK, she is passionate about giving businesses a voice.
