Presented by Indeed
As artificial intelligence continues to change the way we work, organizations are rethinking what skills they need, how they hire and how they retain talent. According to Indeed’s 2025 Tech Talent ReportTech job openings are still down more than 30% from pre-pandemic highs, and yet the demand for AI expertise has never been greater. Up-to-date roles are emerging almost overnight, from fast-track engineers to AI operations managers, and leaders are under increasing pressure to fill skills gaps while supporting their teams through change.
Shibani Ahuja, vice president of enterprise IT strategy at Salesforce; Matt Candy, global partner managing generative AI strategy and transformation at IBM; and Jessica Hardeman, global director of attraction and engagement at Indeed, recently gathered for a roundtable conversation about the future of talent strategy in the tech industry, from hiring and reskilling to how it’s changing the workforce.
Talent acquisition strategies
To find the right candidates, organizations need to make sure their communication is clear from the beginning, and that means starting with a well-thought-out job description, Hardeman said.
“How clearly do you describe the skills that are actually required for the job versus using very high-level or ambiguous language,” she said. “I also highly recommend sourcing skill clusters. We use this to identify candidates who may have those harder-to-find niche skills. This is something we can upskill people in. For example, skills related to distributed computing or machine learning platforms also have other valuable opportunities. Using these clusters can help recruiters identify candidates who may not have the exact skill set you’re looking for, but can quickly upskill.”
Recruiters should also educate themselves and be able to see this potential in candidates. And once they are hired, companies must consciously plan for talent development from the day they walk through the door.
“In the near term, this means focusing on mentoring and building AI fluency into new employee onboarding, development and growth experiences,” she said. “That means offering upskilling that teaches not only the tools they will need, but also how to think with and alongside those tools. The new sweet spot at the start of a career is where technical skills meet our human strengths. Curiosity. Communication. Data evaluation. Workflow design. These are the things that AI can’t replicate or replace. We need to create opportunities for mentoring and sponsorship. Well-being and culture are key elements in ensuring we create good places for talent to start. career.”
How work will evolve with artificial intelligence
As artificial intelligence becomes part of everyday technical work, organizations are rethinking what it means to be a programmer, designer or engineer. Instead of automating roles from start to finish, companies are increasingly creating AI agents that act as team members, supporting employees at all stages of software development.
Candy explained that IBM is already seeing this change in action with its Consulting Advantage platform, which provides a unified layer of AI experience for consultants and technical teams.
“It’s a platform that every one of our consultants uses,” he said. “It is supported by every available element of technology and artificial intelligence model. This is a place where our consultants have access to thousands of agents who help them in every position and activity they perform.”
These aren’t just off-the-shelf tools – teams can create and publish their own agents to the internal marketplace. This sparked a systematic effort to assign each task to classic technology roles and build agents to improve them.
“If I think about your traditional designer, DevOps engineer, AI Ops engineer – what are the different agents that support them in these activities?” Candy said. “It’s much more than just coding. Tools like Cursor, Windsurf, and GitHub Copilot make coding faster, but they’re just one part of end-to-end software delivery. We’re building agents to support people at every step of the journey.”
Candy said this shift is leading towards a workplace where artificial intelligence becomes a collaboration partner rather than a replacement, enabling technical workers to spend more time on artistic, strategic and human-centric tasks.
“I think this future where workers are working with agents who are taking care of some of these repetitive activities and focusing on higher value strategic work where human skills are inherently important is becoming the core of it,” he explained. “You have to free the organization to be able to think and think this way.”
Much depends on the mindset of company leaders, Ahuja said.
“I see a difference between leaders who see AI as cost cutting, reduction – it is a financial activity,” she said. “And then there are organizations that are starting to change their mindset and say, no, the goal is not to replace humans. Ironically, it’s about rethinking work to make us more human. Some leaders have had this story told by their PR teams. But for those who actually believe that AI is going to help us become more human, it’s interesting to see them put this into practice and bridge the gap between humanity and digital work.”
Changing culture towards artificial intelligence
“Companies that are best at overcoming the hurdles of successfully implementing AI and changing culture are the ones that put employees first,” Ahuja added. They prioritize employ cases that solve the most uninteresting problems that burden their teams, showing how AI can lend a hand, rather than looking at what the maximum amount of task automation can replace.
“They think of it as maintaining human responsibility, so in moments where the stakes are high, people will be the ones making the final decision anyway,” she said. “Looking at where AI will lead in terms of scale and speed in terms of pattern recognition, leaving space for humans to bring their own judgment, their ethics and their emotional intelligence. It seems like a very subtle change, but it’s quite big in terms of where it starts at the beginning of the organization and how it trickles down.”
It is also vital to build comfort in using artificial intelligence in employees’ daily work. Salesforce has created a Slack chat called Bite-Sized AI where it encourages all colleagues, including company leaders, to talk about where and why they are using AI and what hacks they have discovered.
“It’s about creating a safe space,” Ahuja explained. “It creates a sense of psychological safety. It’s not just a buzzword. We try to encourage that through behavior.”
“It’s about how to ignite, especially in large enterprises, the passion and fire in everyone’s belly,” Candy added. “Telling stories, showing examples of how great it looks. The phrase is ‘demos, not notes’. Stop writing PowerPoint slides explaining what we’re going to do and getting the tools to show it in real life.”
Hardeman added that AI makes continuous learning non-negotiable and that companies train employees to employ the AI tools provided to them, which goes a long way towards building an AI culture.
“We see upskilling as a retention lever and a performance driver,” she said. “It builds that confidence, reduces the fear around adopting AI. It helps people see a future for themselves as technology evolves. AI hasn’t just raised the bar on skills. It’s raised the bar on how we try to support our people. It’s important that we also rise to the occasion, not just raise expectations for the people we work with.”
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