Tech executives call reskilling and AI governance nonnegotiable

Pew Research Center drew its data from a survey of 42,151 people across 36 countries conducted between Feb. 8 and May 13, supplemented by two U.S.-focused surveys in February and June. The polling organization reported that skepticism about AI’s effect on employment runs highest in wealthier nations.

In the United States, roughly seven-in-ten adults — or more — said AI will cause job losses over the next 20 years, according to the Pew report. That figure is up seven percentage points from two years earlier.

The findings come as enterprise AI deployments continue to advance. At this week’s WSJ Tech Council Summit, most attendees showed little sign of slowing their AI rollouts, the Journal reported. But they also recognized that stronger upskilling, reskilling, and governance are “increasingly nonnegotiable.”

Kate Smaje, McKinsey’s senior partner and global leader of technology and AI, told the summit that companies pulling ahead on AI treat their rollout as a people transformation. She framed the question as one of investment balance.

“For every one dollar I’m spending on the technology, am I spending an equal and opposite dollar on the change management, the reskilling and upskilling?” she asked.

The Pew report lands against a backdrop of legal scrutiny of AI training practices. Court documents unsealed Thursday reveal that AI staff at Microsoft knew that scraping news websites to train models could harm publications, the Journal reported.

In an internal document filed soon after The New York Times sued Microsoft, Brent Hecht, the company’s director of applied science, wrote:

“It is highly unusual that an end-product threatens the economic foundations of its essential suppliers, but that is the situation we have created for our LLM business with respect to its ‘content supply chain,’” Hecht wrote, according to the filing.

At the WSJ summit, panels of executives from Indeed, New York Life, Cencora, Retool, Glean, Mars, Work-Bench, TIAA, Chime, Kai, XBOW, Simile, and CVS Health discussed the operational realities of managing enterprise AI. Topics ranged across governance and control towers, return-on-investment measurement, the shifting build-versus-buy dynamic in enterprise software, cybersecurity workflows for the AI era, and AI-driven human behavior simulations. One panel — with TIAA COO Sastry Durvasula and Chime COO Janelle Sallenave — discussed governance and workflow re-engineering within businesses.