Catching the AI Literacy Wave

Artificial intelligence (AI) is quickly growing to become one of the most widely used tools in the professional world. Its applications for most office jobs are endless; it can help draft emails, capture notes during meetings, and even produce images upon request. This technology has quickly gained a reputation for improving the productivity of employees far beyond what they are capable of on their own. Therefore, business leaders across all sectors are setting the expectation that AI will be used in their workplaces, and that employees should already be well versed with AI’s capabilities, structure, and how to wield it most effectively. 

These expectations are reflected in the fact that as many as two in three leaders wouldn’t hire someone without the in-depth AI skills required to truly leverage the technology. However, it remains a massive skill gap for many existing employees, with 70% of global workers already admitting there is a need to improve their skills. This is in line with the sentiments of the majority of IT decision makers: 60% claim that lack of comfortability with AI is the largest skill gap facing their organization. This often manifests in the form of workers being unable to effectively use generative AI at work and not knowing how to leverage trusted data sources while keeping their first-party data secure. These limitations in the modern workforce’s AI literacy has led to a 50% hiring gap between AI jobs and AI roles. 

One of the most important parts of being literate with AI is becoming familiar with prompt engineering. Prompt engineering is defined as the art and science of structuring the instructions that are fed to a generative AI platform in a way that is easily interpreted and then carried out by the platform. There are many ways to effectively carry this out for text-based commands, including chain of thought, chain of symbol, knowledge generated prompting, least to most prompting, and non-text prompting. There are even more options when it comes to different media forms such as images and videos, such as negative prompts, textual inversion, and prompt injection. Becoming familiar with all of these different methods might help IT workers meet the bar for fluency with AI. 

If most companies, especially those embedded in the tech industry, are to retain their positions in the market they must invest resources to upskill their workers with AI literacy. Currently. 81% of IT professionals think they can use AI efficiently enough. For example, if they want AI to create an image of a rooster, they merely ask the platform to simply make them a rooster. However, research shows that only 12% of these same professionals actually have the depth of skills to perform prompt engineering effectively while utilizing the full extent of AI’s capabilities. There is a lot more specificity that is baked into these prompts. For example, an optimal prompt that would be fed to a generative AI platform would say “create a rooster with XYZ number of colors in 123 styles”. The results would be a lot more impressive than the previous bare bones attempt. 

72% of IT leaders are claiming that these skill gaps need to be urgently addressed, as developing comfortability with these powerful tools will be vital to the AI revolution. Thankfully, there are programs that offer online, skill-based certification courses that are designed to build these exact underdeveloped skills, especially prompt engineering. There are specific courses that are designed for reskilling, upskilling, and cross-skilling professionals in a variety of topics, including financial management, marketing and Excel. There are also learnings curated for business leaders that are designed to introduce the benefits of AI and potential strategies to integrate their use into an organization. Future courses will be designed for even more topics, such as education, entrepreneurship, human resources, and project management. 

These courses will be able to bring IT workers up to speed with the latest AI knowledge in as little as 6 to 8 weeks. Once these workers feel that they are fully comfortable with the capabilities of AI, productivity and efficiency for most major companies will be sure to improve. Workers will also be protecting themselves from becoming obsolete in the eyes of the job market by becoming fully proficient with AI tools. This dual benefit clearly demonstrates the importance and appeal of these certificate-based courses, and hopefully more IT workers will participate in the future. 

In conclusion, AI is a rapidly developing tool that has the chance to completely transform our business landscape. In order to remain ahead of the curve, both workers and leaders alike will need to fully embrace its rising dominance by learning how to wield AI tools effectively. Understanding the intricacies of prompt engineering is a great place to start, and these online certification courses can be a highly beneficial way to get there.

The post Catching the AI Literacy Wave appeared first on SiteProNews.