Want your employees to master AI? Teach them to ask the right questions

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As organizations hunt down AI talent for senior-level roles, many are overlooking the most basic skill they can teach current employees: feeding AI prompts. And its a skill that doesnt require a STEM degree and years in a high-tech role.

[Generative AI is] not really generative, its machine translation. Thats why the quality of the prompt is so important, Sachin Dev Duggal, founder and chief wizard at Builder.AI, said during a panel at theFortune Global Forum conference in Abu Dhabi on Wednesday. Its the quality of the prompt. Its how you put it together. Were very, very early. We seem to have a lot of hysteria around [believing] everything is generated, but really a lot of things are just regression, statistics, and not a lot more.

Dev Duggal believes there are three talent swimlanes within AI:

1. The experts who can build the AI tools.
2. Those who can integrate AI into backend systems.
3. Front-end users who are masters at prompt engineering.

Thats no longer training for AI. Thats training for prompting, Dev Duggal said of front-end users. Focusing on this third swimlane allows companies to tap workers who didnt pursue STEM fields.

We meet with governments around the world, and theyre already [realizing] STEM is not going to work after a decade, Dev Duggal said. Its going to be about art and literature and everything else because it stems the prompting and how you think about the future.

Northwestern Kellogg School of Management Dean Francesca Cornelli said the university is working with several companies and helping them test their AI projects. She believes the academic environment acts as a sandbox where teams can address issues like poor data or ethical concerns without real-world consequences. But she also believes such experimentation should be practiced outside the academic world as well.

Soon, well have a lot of business leaders that say, This is not keeping up with the promises. Well, it depends on the data or the question you ask, says Cornelli. The preparation is to a certain extent theoretical, but a lot is experiential. Try to get the feedback. What did you get wrong? What did you miss? That is something that I think will be essential; otherwise, therell be too many problems generated in business later.

Roles that may be bestsuitedfor prompt engineeringcould also be the ones likely to be mostimpacted by generative AI.

Those people that might be affected by [AIs] productivity in one placemaybe its an opportunity for them to become the best prompt engineer, says Chiara Marcati, a partner at McKinsey. Maybe they were the [executive assistants], and now that EAs have been somewhat automated with Gen AI, they become the best prompter.

Read more coverage fromthe Fortune Global Forumhere.

Paige McGlauflin
paige.mcglauflin@fortune.com
@paidion

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