The AI Upskill Most Teams Are Overlooking

**SPEAKER_1** (0:02)
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**Alexis Huaringa** (0:34)
Welcome to Gartner ThinkCast. I'm Alexis Huaringa. We're back with another standout session from Gartner CIO Leadership Forum. Today, you'll hear from Gartner Distinguished VP Analyst, Mandi Bishop, who breaks down how in the age of AI, the skills that matter most aren't technical, they're the human first soft skills that often get overlooked. Mandi explores why competencies like critical thinking, judgment, contextual awareness, and even healthy skepticism have become the true differentiators between AI value and AI failure. And she offers a hands-on and surprising look at how CIOs can help their teams build and measure these skills in ways that actually stick. Now, here's Mandi Bishop.

**Mandi Bishop** (1:14)
So, I really want to get something straight up front before we dive into this. A lot of people speak dismissively about soft skills, right? But soft skills matter and they matter a lot. And so this session is about how you can continuously identify and cultivate and measure the essential competencies that we all take for granted, right? All of these things that we used to just assume we learned in school and that we could continue to apply throughout our lives, you know, because our people have to become the critical differentiator between AI value and AI failure. Now, we are off to the AI races, and I promise that this is going to be the most fun session that you attend. Before I start, has anybody here ever actually raced a car? Right, sweet. So have I. I started driving when I was 10 because I grew up on a horse ranch, and so my dad taught me how to drive standard manual, five-speed stick shift Mazda pup truck so that I could haul hay and manure and go and get the mail that was like two miles away. But when my dad started building kit cars, right, I loved to help him tear them apart. So for his first one, he built a Lotus 11 and we tore apart an old MG. Sorry, if there were some car people in the audience could nod, you all know what this is. In other words, it's just older cars, right? And when we got into building this kind, it was tearing apart 90s era Mustang 5 GTs, and those were fabulous. But just because I helped build them didn't mean I got to drive them, even when I was old enough, because it's a big step to go from that Mazda pup truck to drifting this 1800 pound aluminum can around corners at 90 miles an hour in an autocross. So years of foundational skill building. And after the session, if you all have a couple extra minutes and you want something fun, if you go on YouTube and you look up Mandi Bishop Cobra Autocross, there's still dash cam video footage of me racing this car and losing my brakes going around a hairpin corner and actually driving off into a field. So it's there. It's really scary. It was fine. Didn't actually wreck, didn't flip the car over, but if you want some entertainment. But that was me. And then there's my dad. So my dad had decades of skill on me. He had decades more driving. He had tons of technical skills. But even my dad, it took him years to just get consistent performance. And my dad still, he still hits the cones on those autocross courses. That's where we are with AI. AI is a Formula One car, and it's got all of the cool components. But your workforce may not yet have the right skills to avoid not just hitting a cone, but hitting the wall.
AI, you know, it can sense the track conditions and it can automatically adapt the position of the spoiler and the suspension, you know, based on its pattern recognition of what the track conditions are, like what's needed for that moment. But AI can't replace that feel, right? The heel-toe connection of the clutch and the gas and the brake. And understanding how to push the RPMs of the engine just past the red line, enough that you can pass that last car without blowing the engine. You know, that is human judgment. And more than half of CIOs say that soft skills like human judgment, right? Core human judgment are in the top five hiring criteria. But those skills are really, really hard to capture and measure. And today, we're going to have fun doing exactly that. So we have a ton of research and a ton of sessions that are on AI literacy. And this is more foundational than that. I'm talking about the competencies that are the bedrock. The things that we all know are crucial, but are eroding with AI. So I've developed what I call a soft skills academy. And it's got specific exercises. It's got scoring rubrics and maturity models. That are fun, they're easy to implement, and they can complement formal training programs. You can implement them at any level or in any function around the enterprise. Now, I know some of you are maybe going to roll your eyes at this, even if it's just inwardly. But, you know, to make this work in the real world and to scale across the enterprise for hiring and for broad workforce training, you're going to have to partner closely with HR.