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In this episode, we take a look at the skills gap that's really affecting your business. Welcome everybody to another episode of ClickAI Radio. All right. So in overcoming the lack of skills in your business, now I'm going to start with, with the focus on AI itself, right, and what that looks like. And I'm going to pull here from certainly my own experiences, but also this is a report I saw from Deloitte, they had they'd said that, hey, they found that those companies that are seasoned with AI skills, they didn't feel they had a big skills gap. Oh, that makes sense. Right. The other thing they pointed out, though, is that the companies that are doing a lot of AI right now are really focusing more on transformational projects than on cost reduction. So from their perspective, hey, when you're getting started, you're often looking at cost reduction as a way to leverage AI. Hmm, I don't know my experience, I've found that it's been more around sales and say, of course, in the supply chain area, there certainly cost reduction there. So all right, that makes some sense. It also said that they broke it into three categories. There were those companies that were seasoned with AI, then the other categories are skilled with AI, and then the other word, the starters, and said that the seasoned ones are of course relying on their own internal skilled resources, had stair season, I guess, by definition, whereas the starters, were leaning more on other companies, right, they're outsourcing some of the AI itself. A couple other points here from this report. So they indicated that two thirds of the seasoned adopters are currently training their developers to create new AI solutions. They're providing more training for more of their employees to do AI work. So rather than leaning away from it, they're actually leaning more into it, because of some of the benefits that they're pulling from it. In another report, this comes from the hill, they said, like there's concerned about AI, an AI workforce, specifically shortage, an AI workforce shortage in the United States becoming a top national security priority. And there are some calls for some legislative action. They're trying to compete with other countries like China and others. But you know, some see little data on the actual AI labor market dynamics, is it really, is there really a workforce shortage? And if so, what does that look like? Now? How do you even quantify that, so you have to back up and think about the skills of AI itself. Now, given that my intent here is true to target and speak with the small to medium business owner, for the most parts, I'm never gonna say go build your own data science team, it's too expensive, as well as you're not going to get the ROI on it. As we all know, we saw that report from MIT last year. That said, Only 10% of companies that are building out their own teams like this are actually achieving achieving the financial results. So we're not we're not going to focus on that, rather, I'm going to target let's go after another approach. There's certainly a shortage of AI skills in the US, right? But hiring your own team to do that isn't going to be the best way. So if you use an AI service and rent the capabilities to get the insights at a fraction of the cost, then if there's not an AI skills gap from your, from your organization, excuse me, then what really is the gap that you're facing? what's what's missing, in terms of you achieving the effects. So the benefits of AI? Well, there is still a skills gap. And the skills gap, though, comes in areas that are not too strange sounding to us. In other words, it's not going to be hey, can your can your particular business analyst deal with, you know, logistic regression algorithms? No, no, no, that that's for the AI people to figure out but as a small to medium business owner, you don't worry about that part. But there are some skill sets that you do need to have or strengthen in your team in order To be effective with leveraging the effects of AI, so I'm going to pull from this report this comes from, from go scale, excuse me, yeah, go go skills excuse me, they they reported that there were three hard skills lacking in recent graduates. This is interesting, right? And it's stuff you already know, right? It's writing proficiency, public speaking, and data analysis, let's apply this to AI, right. So as a small to medium business owner, you want to play AI, you don't need to go deep on all the AI skills. But what you do need to go deep on is your ability to leverage those insights into your business. And that's where you need to spend the time building up your team. Let's look at writing proficiency, Well, certainly AI does a great job at identifying those things that our our brains can't see. So it's also critical that we describe meaning we can write down what the business problems are, and what the challenges are. So writing proficiency does affect the ability to properly point to and use and therefore adopt AI in your small to medium business, public speaking Well, this, of course, dramatically affects your ability to communicate. But specifically, the ability to communicate the transformation, the iterative transformation that your business goes through, when you apply AI, you know, you never apply AI, once you apply it, make a couple small steps, and then apply it again, you do it incrementally, but you also need to be able to communicate, what's the journey that we're on? Alright, so public speaking, whether that's external to your customers, where they're seeing the impacts of this, or internally, the ability to speak is critical. And then third, here was data analysis. And of course, you know, the ability to create insights on your data, use an Excel or whatever other tools, tableau, etc. Those are certainly critical. But in this case, they're critical to help point out that there's a case for AI. Let me let me illustrate that. I was talking with a business executive actually, just last week, who made a statement that although his engineers could do data analysis, they had that skills to use the you know, the various tools to do that. They could not estimate their supplier forecasting, because the data was spread out across so many systems and was so many levels deep, that just the the, you know, analytics tools couldn't actually give them the insights they needed. This is a great place for AI to step in, right. And they were wise to recognize the limits of the data analysis and said, we're not solving the problem, right, the data spread out too much. And so they saw the opportunity for AI to help out. So yes, be skilled the data analysis, but also be skilled at knowing what its limits are. Right. So those are three hard skills that your teams today already have, but course need to strengthen and bone up on. Let's look at some soft skills that was reported out here by this ghost skills report. The five most lacking soft skills in employees they pointed out was number one, critical thinking and problem solving. Number two, attention to detail three communication for leadership and five teamwork. All right, so let's let's just pull these apart here real quick. So critical thinking and problem solving, obviously selecting the right use case to apply AI to solve business problems. That is critical fact that thinking is so critical that we've seen multiple failed AI use cases in the market, right? And of course, it gives a black eye on AI, right? It's like Oh, you're applying AI how you're doing what with it? No. So stay is a small to medium business person stay in the guardrails of sales, use cases and supply chain use cases, right? Look in those areas. And don't go outside of that elite, at least for now. Alright, as AI matures and grows. And as you feel like hey, you've got a handle on this, then certainly go wider. But for now just focus on in those two areas. Number two, the attention to detail. Well, I'm an admitted nerd, and it's so it's easy for some of us to pay attention to detail. But this in fact, becomes our weakness at times, right? We, we can't always see the business problem. So it's critical to help your people certainly have attention to detail, but also be able to step back and look at the context of that. And then this third bucket here communication, leadership, teamwork, you'll need to apply AI transformation as a team, alright, it's because it will affect business processes as you transform your business getting the insights from AI. So it turns out that your organization already has the fundamental skills for AI, not to build your own data science team, but rather to apply the resources. But what it means though, is that you need to strengthen those current skills so that you can be more successful at applying. All right everybody. Thanks for joining and until next time upskill your team to leverage AI services to transform your business. Thank you for joining Grant on ClickAI Radio. Don't forget to subscribe and leave feedback. And remember to download your FREE eBook visit ClickAIRadio.com now.