The central theme of the article and posts Adam Riley and I have published this week is that the Government’s welcome investment in AI skills training must be underpinned by sound strategic planning.
We are mindful, of course, that there is considerable fatigue around yet more calls for AI strategy sessions. A more popular line might have been simply to congratulate the Government for doing something concrete: committing to upskill and reskill 10 million workers by 2030.
And, to be fair, we have congratulated them.
But the clue to why we keep emphasising strategic thinking lies in the initiative’s target date: 2030. Who knows were we will be with AI by then. AI is evolving very fast.
The announcement therefore raises a fundamental question: has sufficient strategic thinking been done to ensure that the skills developed between now and 2030 will remain relevant and genuinely drive productivity and growth?
Answering that takes us firmly into strategic territory. It is not enough to say, “We will lead the way in AI skills training.” We need to address the grown-up questions:
What problem are we trying to solve?
Which human cognitive capabilities must we strengthen to achieve our goals?
How do we retain human judgement within decision-making while taking full advantage of AI?
The answers to these and other critical questions will determine the shape of the training and, ultimately, whether it succeeds.
This analysis may lead us to conclude that, because AI is evolving so rapidly, training should focus less on particular tools and more on helping people improve the quality of their thinking when working alongside AI: the metacognition piece.
This is not fancy jargon. It is central to successful AI training.
The goal should be to amplify people’s thinking capabilities, not merely give them a quick introduction to the latest AI gizmo. We need to strengthen core cognitive skills so that people can continually adapt as new tools arrive.
Strategic thinking will guide us towards teaching people how to think in the AI era: when to offload tasks intelligently to AI and how to avoid lazy cognitive surrender.
That means moving beyond AI skills training as a box-ticking exercise centred on an application that could be obsolete almost before the course is completed.
It means building a workforce with the cognitive mindset and capabilities required to thrive in the emerging era of collective intelligence.
