As more companies adopt generative AI in their business to drive innovations and improve workflows, there’s no doubt that AI and leadership go hand in hand, with leaders spending more time understanding generative AI fundamentals. However, they will also refresh their soft skills like effective communication, decision-making, manager coaching, and change management. In fact, these AI soft skills complement the technical knowledge needed to harness AI effectively. With change comes uncertainty, and there’s a lot of pressure for leaders to help their workforce prepare for and understand the organization’s point of view on the generative AI evolution. Employees need clear guidance and encouragement to be part of the change—including the psychological safety to try new things and fail safely. Now’s the time to harness the power of emotional intelligence and inspect your culture to ensure it supports ongoing learning, critical thinking, and experimentation at all levels of the organization. Generative AI is going to do more for us than we ever imagined. Build your organization’s culture anchored by these critical soft skills to accelerate your opportunities with generative AI.

Generative AI will transform how we learn in 2025, building on ai trends in education that are reshaping the learning landscape. Technology advancements have continually lowered barriers to help more people access quality education. Generative AI-powered learning will open even more opportunities to level the education playing field. Not everyone can have a dedicated, in person tutor, but with generative AI, anyone can have this type of experience embedded in a digital learning system. Research shows that one-on-one tutoring vastly improves student performance, and a body of research is starting to show the value of AI tutoring. The generative AI-powered tutor assists you as you learn, understanding your current knowledge and skill level, where you need additional support, and providing recommendations and coaching along your personalized learning path.

It’s not just students who will benefit from AI tutors or learning assistants, employees who are upskilling and reskilling will too. For leaders this means your investment in digital training modalities for your employees will generate even greater return on investment. According to a Harvard study, adding AI tutoring for “active learning” in its classrooms increased student engagement, motivation, and post-test performance. Your employees can gain that same enhanced learning depth through digital training, allowing you to quickly develop a workforce that has the critical skillsets to contribute to business growth. Simply put, the faster and better your workforce is able to learn new concepts and skills through the power of generative AI, the faster they will be able to help your business innovate and improve the bottom line. I encourage you to check out AWS SimuLearn in AWS Skill Builder.

One of the best ways to keep up with the pace of technology is to invest in organization-wide upskilling initiatives that build an engaged culture of learning. However, it can be tough to know how and where to invest in order to maximize your organization’s immediate innovation need. With the interest in generative AI, in particular, we’re seeing more organizations deploy short-term, highly-focused training initiatives on a specific topic, area, or team. The key is to organize a collaborative, cohort-style training that includes dedicated ideation, hands-on learning, and AI soft skills education. These sessions have a couple of key benefits. First, employees come away with actionable use cases that maximize the newly developed skills, giving them priority focus areas that might not have been possible without the collaborative, hands-on learning. Second, with priority initiatives identified, leaders can make quick decisions about redeploying newly-skilled talent into new roles, or investing in additional reskilling. Third, the short-term and focused nature of the training gives the organization quicker results, which reinforce the business benefit of skills development. This leads to greater leadership buy-in for workforce skills initiatives. Given the success we’ve seen in short-term generative AI trainings, I expect more leaders will adopt this approach as they continue to upskill their workforce in 2025 and beyond. Given how quickly generative AI is evolving, speed matters more than ever in the world of technology and business.

With the rapid pace of technology innovation, training your workforce is no longer a nice-to-do, but a must-do. Ensuring your workforce has the skills to maximize this productivity gain is essential. However, measuring the increased productivity from training, in particular generative AI skills remains elusive. Customers often tell us they don’t know how to measure skill competency or tell if their training is working. This is not a new challenge. But as more leaders recognize the strategic investment in ongoing skills training, it’s resurfacing the need for measurable business value to assign to training initiatives. The short answer is: it’s not always about productivity. It’s a long-game. You are ensuring your team has the right skills to complete the project or initiative so you don’t have to recruit new talent, outsource the work, or worse, shelf the project altogether. Generative AI skills will absolutely make employees more productive, giving you the ability to add new responsibilities to their scope when other, more automated tasks fall away. Measuring the business impact of ongoing training comes down to what can be accomplished that was not possible without the skills development. This takes into account your teams’ engagement, retention, efficiency, collaboration, and confidence to take risks.