ATHVisions/E+/Getty ImagesZDNET’s key takeaways
- Being curious will help professionals thrive.
- This tech CTO looks for curiosity above all else.
- Curiosity means learning AI’s business impact.
What trait do businesses most require in today’s AI-enabled business environment? Many industry and career observers point to one key word: curiosity. But what does this word mean in terms of skills, and how does such a general characteristic translate into tech career advancement?
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“If I had to choose just one trait that will define who thrives in the age of AI, it wouldn’t be intelligence. It wouldn’t even be technical skill. It would be curiosity,” said James Taylor, author of ‘Super Creativity: Accelerating Innovation in the Age of Artificial Intelligence‘. “Because in a world where machines can generate answers instantly, your advantage is no longer what you know. It’s the questions that you choose to ask.”
Aniel Sud, CTO at Optimizely, also said he looks for curiosity in his staff’s talent above all else, and recommended other organizations do the same. ZDNET spoke to Sud at his company’s recent customer conference in New York, and he recounted how he changed his thinking about employment prospects in the AI age.
“Initially, I was pretty concerned about loss of jobs and about the need for retooling,” he said, referring to the advance of AI across businesses in recent years. In his own team, however, integrating AI into workflows has tripled productivity, with people able to handle a wider range of projects.
Work is changing
With AI being introduced across a variety of tasks, “the work doesn’t go away — it becomes more meaningful, faster-paced, and more challenging than ever,” said Sud. “We’re shipping so much more, and there’s so much more that people expect as a result of that. Across the board, there’s going to be more work than they currently have.”
Still, because automated AI tools are replacing some tasks, such as coding, there’s a real possibility that the pipeline of entry-level tech professionals will diminish, with eventual skills shortages at senior ranks, he added.
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This gap will require more upfront training and development, and some degree of patience as professionals develop the skills needed for higher-level tasks. “We’re going to expect more from senior developers,” Sud explained.
“They’re going to increase their extent of oversight over an increasing number of systems and require a greater capacity to reason about systems. That means organizations need to invest in people who are below senior developer and on the way up. But you’re not going to be able to hire people that really know how to go and operate immediately. You’re going to have to meaningfully invest in them and train them to bring them along on that journey.”
New opportunities
The innate sense of curiosity Sud seeks in team members includes curiosity about the diversity of experiences now made possible through AI, about use cases that can be explored, and about outcomes that matter. “Technology is increasingly simple to develop,” he said.
“But it’s never been more critical to understand the business outcomes that come from the technology. It’s more about how you reason through a problem. It’s understanding the consumer of your technology. Your ability to absorb information quickly and distill it into what is meaningful is going to be a critical skill set. Development has moved to a new level, emphasizing addressing business problems head-on versus focusing on specific computer languages.”
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The same principle applies to agents as well as traditional software, he emphasized. “Reasoning through who the agent is, it’s not so difficult, not so different than developing software. You have to think through, ‘What are the requirements, what are the outcomes, what constitutes a good outcome versus a bad outcome?’ and then document that. That business-process mindedness is a huge part of delivering a good agent.”
Along these lines, Sud was bullish on what he sees as rising opportunities for forward-deployed engineers. Their job “is to be, first and foremost, a business analyst,” he explained.
“They’re going to go out, and they’re going to interview. They’re going to understand requirements. They’re going to get really deep with the customer, and explain what’s possible and what’s not possible, and think through what kind of solution would be meaningful, and then actually go and implement it.”
