Migration to affluent countries is at record highs, and some nations short of workers are overcoming political opposition to open their borders even wider, hoping to fill jobs and ease inflation.

Government actions to attract foreign nationals for skilled and unskilled jobs have spread from Germany to Japan and include countries with longtime immigration restrictions and some with a populist antipathy to streams of foreign workers.

The U.S. remains an outlier. Hundreds of thousands of migrant workers have arrived through back channels, but the country isn’t openly welcoming more legal workers, despite the tight labor market. That hesitancy carries economic costs, including persistent worker shortages and wage inflation, according to economists and some U.S. officials.

Unemployment is at a record low 4.8% across the 38 largely affluent countries that make up the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. These and other nations report a long list of open positions from truck drivers to baggage handlers to miners.

Beyond being needed to fill pandemic-driven labor shortages, migrant workers are in demand to fill the gap left by retiring baby boomers and declining populations, economists and Western officials say. “The labor forces of richer countries are hollowing out,” said Michael A. Clemens, an economics professor at George Mason University.

Governments across affluent countries are balancing the economic need for more workers with the political reality that very few electorates are enthusiastic about high levels of immigration.

In Europe and North America, the working-age population is expected to decline from 730 million to 680 million over the next two decades, according to United Nations estimates. Such places as South Korea and Taiwan stand to lose more than half their workforce over the coming decades. The working-age population in sub-Saharan Africa, meanwhile, will increase by 700 million by 2050, according to U.N. projections; in Latin America and the Caribbean, the U.N. estimated an increase of 40 million by midcentury.

For many wealthier countries, labor surpluses abroad are hard to resist. The global labor imbalance, in effect, is driving foreign workers into the open arms of nations that need them.

Around five million more people moved to affluent countries last year than left them, up 80% from pre pandemic levels, according to a Wall Street Journal data analysis. The Journal examined 10 countries that received most of the migration, including the U.S., Germany, the U.K., Canada, Australia and Spain. Migration experts say it is the highest number ever reported. That total includes about two million refugees from Ukraine. Even excluding that surge, net migration was significantly higher than 2019 levels, according to the data.

Germany is rewriting immigration laws to bring in more college graduates as well as blue-collar workers under a new points-based system. Points will be awarded based on age—younger people receive more—educational qualifications, work experience and German-language competency. Canada announced plans late last year to take in nearly 1.5 million more migrants by 2025. Western Australia recently sent a delegation to the U.K. and Ireland to recruit tens of thousands of workers, including police, mechanics and plumbers.

South Korea plans to admit 110,000 low-skill foreign workers this year to work in industries such as farming and manufacturing, up nearly 60% from last year’s quota. Japan, which is opening new visa paths for high-skilled foreign workers, announced in April plans to offer blue-collar workers—including those at factories and farms—a chance to extend their stay and even bring their families. Both countries have been longtime skeptics of immigration.

Spain amended its laws last year to allow more foreign workers from outside the European Union to fill blue-collar jobs left open by a shrinking working-age population. José Luis Escrivá Belmonte, Spain’s minister of inclusion, social security and migration, estimated that his country will need to add 300,000 foreign workers a year to keep the economy running and support the national pension system.

Spain’s unemployment rate is 13% and has been around that level or higher for 15 years. Mr. Escrivá said unemployed Spaniards tended to be age 50 or older and not necessarily suited to fill open jobs needed in sectors such as agriculture, construction or film production.

José Antonio Moreno Díaz, an official at Spain’s Trade Union Confederation of Workers’ Commissions, which represents over a million workers, including migrants, said training opportunities for higher-paying jobs should be offered to citizens. “We are not against bringing in real needed foreign workers,” he said. “But let’s pay attention to unemployed people in the Spanish labor market.”

Opponents in various countries warn of citizens losing jobs to outsiders willing to work for less money. Some say the cost of providing newcomers with healthcare, education and other public services outweighs the economic benefits, especially for low-skill workers who pay little in taxes.

Others argue that such immigration is a quick fix that slows economies in the long term.

“Labor shortages are very healthy,” said Mikal Skuterud, an economics professor at University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada. “They force employers to use existing workers more efficiently and invest in technology, that’s all good stuff.”

Finland and Greece are building hundreds of miles of new land barriers to prevent illegal migrant crossings. In Italy and Sweden, voters recently elected governments with a more restrictive approach to immigration, and both are planning reforms to slow both legal and illegal migrant arrivals.

More jobs, higher pay

The U.S. hasn’t made any significant immigration reforms in 33 years, and the last serious attempt in Congress dates back a decade or more. Few issues are so politically divisive in Washington, making any chance of a policy overhaul seem unlikely, according to immigration experts.

Despite restrictive immigration policies, migrants seeking work in the U.S. are finding jobs more quickly and at higher pay than at any time in recent memory. Tens of thousands of people crossed into the U.S. from Mexico illegally and were arrested over the past 10 days, while some 20,000 were detected by various forms of surveillance but not caught, the U.S. Border Patrol chief wrote on Twitter.

In the U.S., the limit on H-1B visas available for highly skilled workers has changed little since 1990. Presidential administrations over the past 15 years have clamped down on illegal border crossings without creating new legal immigration pathways, prompting more urgent discussions about immigration policy and the labor shortage, said Giovanni Peri, chairman of the economics department at the University of California, Davis where he directs the Global Migration Center, whose recent research favours more immigration.

U.S. Border Patrol agents made a record 2.2 million arrests along the Mexican border in the 2022 fiscal year, up from 1.65 million arrests in 2021. The migrant crossings were driven, in part, “because the U.S. economy is screaming out for their labor,” said Mr. Clemens, the economist.

New channels have recently opened. More than 300,000 Ukrainian refugees entered the U.S. since Russia invaded Ukraine last year, many through a Biden administration program called Uniting for Ukraine. That number is more than the total number of refugees admitted into the U.S. through legal channels over the previous seven years. In North Dakota, energy companies are tapping Ukrainians to fill jobs in the Bakken oil fields.

Around 450,000 migrant refugee workers—largely from Afghanistan, Ukraine, and Latin America—entered the U.S. legally in 2021 and 2022 and are working under temporary government protections in industries with labor shortages, according to an April report by FWD.us, a pro-immigration think tank. Those workers are estimated to have filled about a quarter of total job openings this year in such industries as construction, food services and manufacturing, the report said.

The labor shortage is pushing inflation in affluent countries where employers, competing for workers, are raising wages to hire and keep them. “I do think more migrant workers would reduce the inflation rate,” said Spencer Cox, the Republican governor of Utah, which has a 2.4% unemployment rate, slimmer than even the U.S. rate of 3.4%.

Gov. Cox and Republican Gov. Eric Holcomb of Indiana, which is also short of workers, want to rally other governors in a long-shot proposal for Congress to give states a measure of authority over legal immigration.

The U.S. and other countries are divided about how to limit illegal immigration while keeping a pathway for a flow of potential employees for various industries. A plurality of Americans think the U.S. should admit fewer migrants, according to recent Gallup polls.

To gather bipartisan support for increased legal immigration, especially for skilled workers, Utah Gov. Cox said the government needs to demonstrate better control over the U.S.-Mexico border. “Scenes of tens of thousands of migrants streaming across the border in a way that could threaten national security,” he said, “make it harder to have that higher-level conversation.”

Learning the ropes

Mathias Senn, a butcher in Germany’s wealthy Black Forest region, posted job ads in newspapers and online, seeking to replace four of 10 employees who were preparing to retire. “There were no interested people,” he said. “Nothing at all.”

Last year, Mr. Senn hired an apprentice from India, taking advantage of a new law that allowed businesses to hire unskilled people from outside the EU. Local business associations are helping hundreds more workers arrive from India. India’s unemployment rate is around 8%, compared with about 3% in Germany.

Mr. Senn’s 22-year-old apprentice, Rajakumar Bheemappa Lamani, makes about 940 euros a month, around $1,020, while learning the ropes. Mr. Lamani said it was difficult to save money because of the high cost of living, but he hoped to stay.

Germany needs to add around half a million immigrants a year in the next decades as the baby boomer era draws to a close, said Herbert Brücker, head of migration research at the Institute for Employment Research, a federal agency. “We have in Germany about two million vacancies, an absolute peak historically,” he said.

Young people in Germany aren’t interested in manual work, said Joachim Lederer, a butcher in Weil am Rhein, a town of 30,000 by Germany’s borders with France and Switzerland. His son, who studied and worked at the University of California, Berkeley, and Cornell, is a professor of mathematical statistics.

Mr. Lederer recently hired an apprentice from India who had studied computer science, and he has anointed a young Italian immigrant to take over the butcher shop when the time comes.

The U.K. added a record half-million new migrants in the year ended June 2022, even after exiting the EU, which made it more difficult for EU citizens to obtain visas.

Alan Manning, former chair of the U.K. Migration Advisory Committee, which consults government officials on immigration policy, said people accepted the idea of allowing foreign workers if their skills are needed. But some “get anxious about immigration when they perceive it to be out of control,” he said.

Amjed Nizam, a Sri Lankan design engineer trained in Hong Kong, looked for an exit overseas when Sri Lanka’s economy imploded last year. The 29-year-old discovered a new U.K. program that grants two-year work visas to recent graduates of top universities, even without a job offer.

U.K. authorities approved Mr. Nizam’s online application within three weeks, he said. He arrived late last year, found a job with a broadcasting company and now lives in London with his wife and daughter.

Paul Papalia, a government minister in Western Australia, said the region desperately needs workers in both public and private sectors to serve the mining industry, which is booming from global demand for battery-powered vehicles that rely on locally mined lithium, cobalt and nickel.

Mr. Papalia led a delegation in March to pubs and other spots in the U.K. to try to lure as many as 30,000 British workers with the prospect of better salaries and sunny weather. Nearly 70,000 job seekers expressed interest so far, including 1,100 applications to join the police force, he said.

Only about a fifth of Australians supported more immigration, according to a poll last year by the Lowy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank in Sydney. Mr. Papalia said voters in his state nonetheless support his recruitment efforts. “They ask, ‘Where are the people who are going to help us build our house?’ ”

Artificial intelligence has been affecting how we work for some time—helping to craft job postings and evaluate applications, judging how efficiently we complete jobs and, for gig workers, determining assignments and pay.

But in the past year, and especially the past six months, generative AI has supercharged the potential of technology to help, hinder or reorient how we work. Visual tools like DALL·E 2 and Midjourney may drastically change graphic design. Large language-model text generation, beginning in earnest with the release of ChatGPT, promises to affect every activity that involves touching a keyboard.

To learn more about how the worlds of work and AI will interact, we spoke with experts in computer science, human resources, recruiting, corporate leadership, psychology and more. Here are some of their predictions.

Automating ideas

AI will continue the current process of automating parts of workers’ jobs. But while today’s automation is often described as applying to dull, dirty and dangerous tasks such as moving parts in a factory or warehouse, generative AI brings a new dynamic: Primarily, it supports knowledge work by providing the ability to create first drafts of documents, emails, presentations, images, video, product designs, etc.

So, knowledge workers might spend more time editing than creating, particularly as generative AI is embedded into all the software products they use today. For instance, instead of an email system just typing ahead a few words, it could draft several paragraphs. Customer-relationship-management software could suggest topics to discuss with a sales prospect and even a script to follow. And a salesperson could describe a presentation in natural language, and draft slides could be created, accessing corporate data and images to fill out details.

But there are some GenAI applications where the potential to have transformative impact really comes to the fore: For example, in research and development, some experiments using generative AI to support writing software code have shown very high levels of increasing productivity. But that doesn’t mean we’ll need a lot fewer software engineers, because the world needs more software. Generative AI also has the potential for improving the productivity of contact centres. There already were technologies that could automate interactions with customers; generative AI has the potential for making these interactions feel much more natural.

—Michael Chui, partner, McKinsey Global Institute

Flatter organisations

Artificial intelligence is likely to flatten many organisations due to its ability to automate work activities. Right now, most organisations have entry-level people who perform routine tasks, midlevel individuals who supervise them and high-level employees who set the direction of the organisation.

That organisational structure will no longer be necessary. AI can automate many of the tasks performed by entry-level workers. Accounting features, purchase orders and job requisitions are already being automated, and workplaces no longer need people who manually compile or analyse information.

As generative AI becomes more widely deployed, even more tasks will be automated. In addition, job supervision and assessment won’t need as much human oversight. Customers can rate employees on how well they perform basic tasks and allow people to get the services they want. Using data analytics and AI, companies can use the responses to weed out low-performing workers and reward their top individuals. The end result will be fewer layers of management and a smaller number of employees overall in the organisation.

—Darrell West, senior fellow, governance studies, Brookings Institution

How human are we? Machines will tell us

In the past, managers turned to software to judge workers on technical matters—counting keystrokes or time away from the screen. Now companies are using machines to judge how much empathy their employees show.

I was recently sent a “management tip of the day,” advice on how to prepare for a job interview conducted by an artificial intelligence—a process that is all too common these days. A good score required that I appear “natural” with the machine, defined as injecting “authenticity and humanity to the interview.” It seemed a through-the-looking-glass request. A machine would be judging me on qualities that only human beings can exhibit.

The AI judgments don’t end with interviews. It is increasingly common for corporations to use AI programs to monitor employee empathy on the job. For instance, in call centres, AI programs coach and score workers on an empathy scale to judge their performance with callers.

With the addition of ChatGPT to a full suite of office products, texts, emails and calls, there is no limit to the interactions that may be judged by pretend-empathy machines. They will pretend to understand jealousy, competition, depression and insecurity, all the messy human feelings that come up in the life of a firm.

When machines test us on how we respond to such human complexities, high scores may go to those who exhibit qualities that machines value most—consistency and a bias toward tidying up what seems messy. Those who don’t stack up may lose their jobs.

It is backward thinking: Technology redefines human empathy as what machines can understand. Having built the machines that will judge us, now we will train ourselves to please the machines.

—Sherry Turkle, author and Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

A threat to ethics

We are already seeing the rise of digital assistants that speak with a human voice and can use human appearance and social intelligence to negotiate disputes, brainstorm business strategies or conduct interviews. But our research illustrates that people may act less ethically when collaborating via AI.

Traditionally, teammates establish emotional bonds, show concern for each other’s goals and call out their colleagues for transgressions. But these social checks on ethical behaviour weaken when people interact indirectly through virtual assistants. Instead, interactions become more transactional and self-interested.

For instance, in typical face-to-face negotiations, most people follow norms of fairness and politeness. They feel guilt when taking advantage of their partner. But the dynamic changes when people use an AI to craft responses and strategies: In these situations, we found, people are more likely to instruct an AI assistant to use deception and emotional manipulation to extract unfair deals when negotiating on their behalf.

Understanding these ethics risks will become an active focus of business policy and AI research.

—Jonathan Gratch, professor of computer science, University of Southern California

An edge for the aged

AI will enable older workers to be seen, even by those with ageist eyes, as young again.

Younger adults tend to excel at work that uses fluid intelligence that involves analysis and solving discrete problems quickly. Older workers are thought to exhibit greater crystallised intelligence—the capacity to leverage experience and knowledge gained over years to quickly see patterns, nuance and emotional insights, and the capacity to determine which problems should be addressed and which are just noise.

AI is likely to provide a kind of augmented intelligence to older workers, enabling experienced professionals to fully leverage their talent and skills.

For example, AI will be an invaluable collaborator with physicians, speeding the collection and organisation of critical information such as patient symptom history, genetic profiles, medication interactions, as well as past successful treatment plans for similar conditions, etc. These systems will enable physicians of all ages to gather information quickly, but older doctors will be better equipped to apply their years of experience and knowledge to validate AI diagnoses and treatment recommendations.

AI will be more than a collaborative assistant to older workers. It will also be a valuable coach. The sheer growth and velocity of knowledge and technology is making training and upskilling essential. Unfortunately, many employers don’t invest in older-worker education. Now AI applications are being deployed in workplace education to address individual learning and knowledge gaps, helping older workers remain current and competitive.

—Joseph F. Coughlin, director of AgeLab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Navigating new tech

Today, most organisations suffer from a “digital dexterity gap,” where the workforce is largely unable to keep pace with fast-changing technology. Organisations have more technology than their employees are comfortable using, creating barriers to efficiency and productivity growth.

AI services strip away complexity. By using conversational interfaces and natural-language processing, AI removes the need for workers to master complex computer functions and menus. People simply describe what is needed, in nontechnical language, and refine their requests to get better output.

An employee, for example, could give an AI historical data and say, “Find and rank all the variables that will determine the market potential for this new product.” Before conversational interfaces were developed, getting the information would require a lengthy and complex series of interactions.

—Matt Cain, vice president and distinguished analyst, Gartner

An opportunity for building talent

As AI takes over routine tasks, there will be a temptation to cut the whole tier of entry-level employees: Summarising documents, answering routine emails, writing basic computer code and solving simple logistical challenges are all tasks that AIs can do about as well as an inexperienced human, and at much lower cost.

But employers still need an on ramp for new hires. If you stop hiring entry-level employees, you’ll have to do all your midlevel hiring from outside the organisation. And if every organization pares back on entry-level hires, it will get harder and harder to find experienced midcareer talent anywhere.

That’s why it pays to cultivate your own long-term talent pool by hiring green employees, but rethinking how they are tasked and trained. Instead of piling your juniors with grunt work and trusting that they’ll learn through observation, assign them more challenging tasks, like drafting reports instead of just summarising them—the explosion in AI research and writing tools means that kind of work is now well within the grasp of inexperienced hires. With more active coaching and mentoring, these green employees can grow into valuable colleagues, much more quickly.

—Alexandra Samuel, digital-workplace speaker and co-author of “Remote, Inc.”

The danger of following blindly

So many jobs involve writing standard responses—thank-you notes to customers, responses to job applicants and unfortunately term papers—that AI is instantly and easily used in almost every white-collar role.

The concern isn’t that the responses produced aren’t original or creative. How creative does a performance appraisal need to be? It is that if ChatGPT writes the report, the “author” hasn’t thought about it, hasn’t weighed the arguments and then come to their own conclusions in the text. They cannot explain to someone why the report says what it does, but they now have to live with its conclusions.

What happens when the ChatGPT report fails to include proprietary information that you could have found if you searched yourself, and it changes the conclusions? How do we explain to a subordinate why the appraisal written by ChatGPT gave them a lower score compared with last year, even though their performance seemed to be the same? The temptation to use it without thinking through the arguments and explanations could lead to big mistakes.

—Peter Cappelli and Sonny Tambe, professor and associate professor, Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania

Big-picture thinking

Workers are already using ChatGPT to craft the perfect Facebook ad or tools like Descript to edit videos, but AI will get incorporated in more upstream work. AI will be in the boardroom, brainstorming sessions and planning meetings.

Imagine an AI system that runs global simulations and impact analyses for 5,000 different budget plans. Or an AI that proactively writes new code for you when it discovers that you have a bottleneck in your sales planning. Or a proxy AI trained on customer research that allows you to have simulated conversations with your target market. We’re moving from task-oriented AI to goal-oriented AI, and enterprises are looking to leverage it safely, securely and ethically.

—Allie K. Miller, AI entrepreneur, adviser and investor

Money management and the human touch

Many asset-management companies are now offering hybrid advisory services—involving both human advisers and algorithms—to their clients. But these new services are unlikely to reduce the demand for human advisers.

Instead, automation is expanding the market for financial advisers by making it more cost effective to serve clients with lower levels of wealth. Human advisers can now cater to more clients, since certain tasks, such as addressing simple customer queries and constructing portfolios, can be automated. As a result, asset managers are now hiring more human advisers instead of laying them off.

In addition, the requirements for a financial adviser’s success are changing. As more portfolio management is turned over to algorithms, technical portfolio-allocation skills are becoming less significant. However, it is becoming more important for advisers to explain how algorithms operate and assist investors in navigating turbulent market conditions. Our research shows that human advisers are still essential for customer satisfaction and retention because of their ability to reduce clients’ discomfort from interacting with algorithms and reducing clients’ uncertainty regarding the algorithms’ performance.

—Alberto Rossi, finance professor and director of the AI, Analytics and Future of Work Initiative, Georgetown University

Navigating the corporate-benefits maze

AI-powered “concierge” systems will reduce or eliminate the frustrating search for answers that many employees endure today when seeking services from their employer. These systems will help employees make the most of their benefits, stay compliant with policies or simply find out information about their colleagues, organisation structure or customers that can sometimes be difficult to unearth in large organisations. When do my health benefits renew? What is my current deductible? What is the policy for meal expenses in New York?

What’s more, in the hybrid work environment, AI-driven concierge tools will book conference rooms, optimise the location of colleagues in the office so they can better collaborate, and help office managers manage capacity and services.

—Joe Atkinson, U.S. chief products and technology officer, PwC

Don’t forget human judgment

At its best, AI will drive better collaboration and productivity. It will help employees turn notes into documents and documents into presentations. Yet human judgment is key to unlocking AI’s power. Our data reveals that only around half of employees believe they know when to question the results of automation or AI—the other half don’t think they have that skill. But generative AI is already known to hallucinate—make up false facts—and employees who blindly follow its outputs risk failing.

So, companies must equip employees with the skills and inclinations needed to successfully use AI. Rather than acting on the AI’s meeting summary alone, employees must understand that talking to human colleagues who attended the meeting isn’t optional. They must also learn to proofread AI-produced text, confirming cited facts with outside sources. And governance structures must ensure that AI-produced content always includes a human in the loop before it is used.

—J.P. Gownder, vice president and principal analyst, Forrester

Machines get into human resources

The emergence of AI tools and data analytics is transforming the way organisations discover, assess and select talent. If trained with the right data, AI models can also compare candidate profiles to a company’s most successful employees, identify professionals with a proven record and determine who is most likely to consider a job change.

For example, for certain roles, high performers’ profiles include a broad range of skills that are relevant to multiple roles, while for other functions, optimal skill sets are much more narrow and specific. Our data indicates that the comparison of a candidate’s skills to those of high performers produces the most predictive indicator of future success, particularly on contract jobs.

Also, AI models can be further enhanced by incorporating individual performance data for employees or contractors who have previous experience with an employer. There is a wealth of such data available to talent solutions firms that employ hundreds of thousands of contractors annually.

Ultimately, though, it is important to think of AI as a tool—not a substitute—for the human art of recruiting. Assessing and selecting talent requires insight about a candidate’s communication skills, attitude and determination level and what it takes to succeed.

—M. Keith Waddell, president and CEO, Robert Half

A productivity boost

Early research suggests that while generative AI is likely to boost the productivity of all workers, it may benefit low-skilled workers more. A randomised field experiment by Microsoft reported that generative AI enabled a 55% decrease in average task-completion time for software developers, with the most benefit for older developers and those with less programming experience. Similarly, a study from MIT reports that ChatGPT’s use in professional writing raises average productivity and quality for low-ability workers more than their high-ability peers.

In an ongoing experimental study with M.B.A. students who were tasked with writing business reports, I found that ChatGPT’s availability not only increased productivity but also student satisfaction. More students expressed a desire to write when a tool like ChatGPT was available. In short, the impact of generative AI might not just be a general increase in productivity but also a narrowing of the productivity gap between low-skilled workers and high-skilled ones.

—Kartik Hosanagar, John C. Hower Professor, Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania

A tool for hackers

It is the classic email scam: An employee receives a bogus note that appears to be from their manager, telling them to transfer funds to some account. For this to be convincing, the attacker needs to access the company’s computer systems to learn about the firm and the target, including their personal details.

AI makes this scamming much easier—and more dangerous.

By getting access to companies’ internal emails and nonpublic reports, hackers can use AI to generate very convincing messages. For example, the message might start with: “Fred, it was great to have dinner with you and your wife last Wednesday, we should do that again. Meanwhile, I need you to…”

Or how about a phone call or videoconference with your boss? Deep fakes make it possible to imitate the voice and even the image of your manager.

AI may also lead to smaller and smaller targets for scams. If it takes lots of manual labor to create customised spear-phishing emails, it is not worth it for hackers to cheat people out of $100. But if AI makes it trivial and cheap to create phoney emails, no one is too low on the totem pole to be ignored.

All this raises the level of skepticism that we must have substantially. Procedures will have to be put in place to validate the authenticity of who you are dealing with. In many cases, a phone call might be sufficient. A somewhat deeper approach might be a phone call to the boss’ administrative assistant, in addition to a boss—a bit like doing multifactor authentication on the computer. In extreme cases, a face-to-face meeting might be necessary.

—Stuart Madnick, professor of information technologies, MIT Sloan School of Management

Spotting the skill gaps

AI helps organisations build for the future by automatically detecting employee, team and organisation wide skills—and identifying ways to address gaps before management is even aware of them.

For roles like nurses, software developers and marketers, necessary skills are constantly changing, and it can be tough for organisations to keep track of what is needed. Nurses, for instance, must become familiar with an ever-increasing number of tech platforms, as well as data analysis to help patient outcomes.

As these needs evolve, AI can help keep track of what skills organisations need and predict what they might need next. For instance, a business could use AI to scan job descriptions in its industry to look for trends. The AI might notice that lots of marketing jobs now require employees to understand new types of analytics—and your employees must understand them, too, or miss out on important strategic insights.

—Mahe Bayireddi, CEO and co-founder, Phenom