AI News Monitor

Amazon Web Services director Jenni Troutman believes job seekers and employees must pivot towards gaining critical AI skills.

Amazon Web Services executive, Jenni Troutman, has warned both job seekers and professionals that AI literacy has become a crucial skill for today’s workforce.

In an interview with Computerworld, Troutman, Director of Training and Certification Products and Services at Amazon Web Services, said that professionals need to be “upskilled on just what AI is to begin with, and then how to use it in their day-to-day jobs.”

Amazon Web Services offers a certified AI practitioner course, which helps people gain understanding of AI-related concepts to boost their careers. Troutman says that professionals are taking the course at an unprecedented scale. The number of participants who took the beta exam was 20 times the historical average for new beta courses.

One AI skill that has gained serious traction, according to Troutman, is prompt engineering. It involves writing good prompts to produce optimal responses from gen AI. The AWS director believes that it is an important skill to acquire, regardless of one’s role.

Gaining relevant skills is crucial for professionals as the modern workforce continues to change. Experts predict that AI will completely transform the job sector within the next five years.

Already, the rise of generative AI has changed the way that employees learn and deploy their skill set. Established professionals in law and banking have reported using AI models to compose messages for clients, customers, and colleagues. Even people working in government have reported using gen AI to conduct research and draft legal documents.

A Deloitte survey carried out across 11 countries showed that up to 44 percent of companies actively encourage their employees to use gen AI. A further 19 percent only allow it rather than actively encourage it.

Troutman believes that employees who do not acquire AI-related skills are in danger of losing relevance. Similarly, traditional skills that lack creativity and simply involve repetitive action may soon become outdated. The Amazon senior leader gives entry-level software developers as a prime example, saying that the position will become less and less relevant in the future. People at that level will have to learn new skills or adapt to upcoming “specialty areas.”

Top tech leaders such as Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang have made similar statements in the past. They believe that upcoming tech workers may need to expand into more creative areas as tasks like coding are taken up by AI assistants.

However, Huang also made it clear that there will continue to be traditional roles for programmers. If someone wants to learn programming, they should, said the Nvidia CEO, “because we’re hiring programmers.”