Opinion Paper: “So what if ChatGPT wrote it?” Multidisciplinary perspectives on opportunities, challenges and implications of generative conversational AI for research, practice and policy
Workera Study: Leaders Say Employees Are "AI-Ready," Employees Disagree
99% of L&D leaders believe their workforce will be "AI-ready" in the next two years, but only 14% of employees believe their organization is fully on track to acquire the necessary AI skills
PALO ALTO, Calif., April 23, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- Workera, the leading AI-powered skills intelligence platform, today announced its inaugural 2025 State of Skills Intelligence Report. The study highlights several areas of disconnect between organizational leadership perceptions and employee realities in AI skills development, exposing the challenges within the current state of workforce transformation. The U.S. Was found to have the least formal AI-related business objectives for 2025 and the least implemented overall AI adoption strategies.
Workera, the leading AI-powered skills technology platform (PRNewsfoto/Workera.Ai)"Organizations are racing to adopt AI, but they are failing to bring their workforce along on the journey, which not only explains the disconnect but the biggest fundamental challenge in successful AI transformation," said Kian Katanforoosh, CEO and founder of Workera. "If your AI strategy is not reaching your employees, it's already failing. This data report enables leaders of all industries to make data-driven investment decisions to close the gaps in workforce preparation and setting AI business objectives."
Organizations With AI Objectives Are Racing Ahead Companies with a clear and documented AI strategy are leaving the competition behind when it comes to upskilling talent.
Daily Use: These companies are significantly more likely (61% vs 17%) to feel that their workforce is very prepared in terms of integrating AI into their daily workflows.
Organizational Readiness: These learning and development leaders are more likely (87% vs 38%) to feel that their organization will be fully "AI-ready" in the next two years.
Closing the Skill Gap: These companies are more likely (81% vs 28%) to feel that their employees are fully on track to acquire the necessary skills for an AI-enabled future beyond tools like ChatGPT.
The Growing AI Skills GapThese data points illuminate the disconnect undermining organizational AI transformation efforts from a communications and implementation perspective.
Promotion Promises vs. Reality: While 88% of organizations claim to prioritize AI skills in promotions, only 25% of employees feel these skills are actually being prioritized.
Leadership Communication Breakdown: 57% of employees report poor leadership communication about AI strategies, with a mere 10% finding it very effective.
Effectiveness of Training Under Scrutiny: 32% of L&D leaders believe their training programs are very effective in addressing skills gaps—a view shared by just 11% of employees.
Story Continues
Aspiration Outweighs Execution These stats evaluate the stark contrast in perspective from different levels of employees about the present and future of their companies' AI readiness.
Leadership Optimism: 63% of L&D leaders believe their organizations will be fully AI-ready within two years.
Employee Skepticism: In contrast, only 22% of employees believe their organization will be truly AI-ready.
Training Gap: Despite 51% of leaders claiming a fully defined AI adoption strategy, only 25% of employees have been offered AI training in the past year.
AI Transforms How Businesses OperateAI is reshaping how all organizations develop, hire, compete, and function at every level. The following metrics demonstrate AI integration across corporate ecosystems.
AI is Ubiquitous: Nearly all organizations (99%) are now using AI in some capacity.
Skills Over Degrees: 84% of companies now prioritize verified AI skills over traditional degrees in hiring decisions.
Workforce Growth, Not Reduction: 80% of L&D leaders anticipate AI will increase, not decrease, overall employee headcount.
Rapid AI Training: The U.S. Leads in preparing new hires with AI-related skills, with 44% fully trained within their first 90 days of employment.
"The most notable takeaway from this report is that companies with a clearly defined AI strategy are well ahead of the competition when it comes to upskilling talent," added Katanforoosh. "These organizations are prioritizing skills intelligence and are in turn more proficient in their AI adoption, scoring tens of points higher in these areas. It's clear that businesses must come together internally to define their AI business objective for 2025 to make a tangible impact on their company's readiness for an AI future."
To download the full 2025 State of Skills Intelligence Report and explore the complete findings, visit: workera.Ai/blog/state-of-skills-intelligence-report
To learn how Workera can help you with skills-first workforce transformation initiatives in 2025, visit: workera.Ai.
Methodology
Workera surveyed 800 full-time professionals who oversee workforce development, skills strategy, or L&D programs. Each of the respondents works for a company with 5,000 or more employees. The survey was conducted in February 2025 by Sago.
To capture the employee perspective, Workera surveyed 800 full-time professionals who work for a company with 5,000 or more employees in the United States in March 2025 via Pollfish.
About WorkeraWorkera is pioneering the future of skills technology, reimagining how organizations align business needs with verified skills data to future-fit their workforce and accelerate productivity and innovation. Trusted by the Fortune 500, Workera leverages AI-powered agents to deliver unparalleled insights into workforce capabilities, utilizing a state-of-the-art skills ontology and cutting-edge LLMs for the most precise skill measurements available. With Workera, businesses can strategically align teams, accurately identify and bridge skill gaps, and optimize talent allocation with unprecedented efficiency. Our commitment to delivering measurable and verified skill data empowers business leaders to not only manage their workforce more effectively, but also to harness the full potential of their human capital. Workera was named in Fast Company's exclusive Most Innovative Companies list for 2024 alongside Microsoft, Canva, and others leading the AI revolution. Discover how Workera is helping future-proof workforces at Accenture, Siemens Energy, Belcorp, The United States Air Force, and Samsung at www.Workera.Ai.
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SOURCE Workera.Ai
Workera's CEO Was Mentored By Andrew Ng. Now He Wants An AI Agent To ...
Yahoo is using AI to generate takeaways from this article. This means the info may not always match what's in the article. Reporting mistakes helps us improve the experience.Generate Key Takeaways
Kian Katanforoosh has one of the best mentors in the AI world: renowned researcher Andrew Ng, who also served as his graduate school advisor at Stanford. The two went on to create Stanford's deep learning program, and now Ng serves as chairman of Katanforoosh's startup, Workera. Ng has been a meaningful guide in Katanforoosh's career, but now the Workera CEO is trying to break down what it means to be a good mentor, and automate it through a new AI agent, Sage.
"I trust Andrew because I understand his background and expertise, but how many Andrews are there in the world? Not that many," said Katanforoosh in an interview. "So automating this mentorship aspect was critical."
On Tuesday, Workera announced Sage, an AI agent you can talk with that's designed to assess an employee's skill level, goals, and needs. After taking some short tests, Workera claims Sage will accurately gauge how proficient someone is at a certain skill. Then, Sage can recommend the appropriate online courses through Coursera, Workday, or other learning platform partners. Through chatting with Sage, Workera is designed to meet employees where they are, testing their skills in writing, machine learning, or math, and giving them a path to improve.
A screenshot of Sage.
To be clear, Workera's definition of "mentor" is a hyper-specific one; Katanforoosh acknowledges that Sage will not do everything Ng did for him. Encouragement, career guidance, and networking are hard to automate. But Sage can somewhat objectively assess an employee's skillset, and recommend the right courses to help achieve their goals. While that's not a perfect mentor, it's better than some have access to.
As the son of Iranian immigrants, Katanforoosh's parents were forced to flee their home country during the unstable 1970s, abandoning their studies in the process. His father left a science degree behind and ended up selling clothes in France to make a living. While today's Workera largely serves Fortune 500 employees, Katanforoosh believes that making assessment skills more available could one day help people in his parents' situation.
People are craving mentorship today more than ever. In the era of remote work, young employees receive less face time with experienced colleagues, meaning less chances to catch some nuggets of wisdom by the water cooler. The CEO of Workera thinks the company's new AI agent is up to the task.
Sage will roll out to early access customers as of November 2024, including defense technology provider Booz Allen. Other Workera customers, including the U.S. Air Force and Accenture, will get general access to Sage in March 2025.
Workera has raised more than $44 million to administer AI-generated tests for enterprise employees, offering employers a way to gauge their employees' skillsets. Employees typically don't jump at the chance to be compared to their coworkers, but Workera tries to offer a way for businesses to invest in their employees as well.
An employers perspective using Sage.
Sage does the same thing, but offers a more conversational experience that ties together the Workera platform more neatly. The flexibility of OpenAI's multimodal models, which Workera uses, also offers a flexible interface that's capable of scaling to drastically more tasks in various mediums. Indeed, 95% of Sage's interactions are
With Sage, Workera is claiming to become a mentor for workers, instead of just an administer of skill assessments. A human mentor offers emotional support, encouragement, and connections that an AI chatbot likely never could. However, in some aspects of mentorships, Katanforoosh thinks Sage can be better.
Sage provides benchmarks to mark progress on various skills.
"A good mentor needs to assess properly, because unless the mentor can assess accurately, it cannot help you... That's one that can be automated," said Katanforoosh. "In fact, I'm pretty confident measurement systems we have today are better than most people; I would trust the Workera system much more than I trust myself at measuring someone's machine learning skills."
Another aspect to this is that humans are biased and highly influenced by superficial traits, so they may not always make accurate assessments of someone's talent. AI systems are not perfect either, for the record, and contain many of the same biases as the humans that created them. After all, AI models are mostly based on human-generated data.
But the biases of AI models may have a more promising solution than that of humans. Katanforoosh teaches a course at Stanford which covers bias mitigation methods in AI. He firmly believes there are ways to reduce bias underlying an AI model's data with algorithms. These can weight gender, race, or other considerations in a different way, making the outputs of AI models more equitable.
"I actually feel very confident that AI is already much less biased, but will be even less biased than humans in the coming years," said Workera's CEO.
By automating these tasks, Katanforoosh says managers can be freed up to manage the human aspects of mentorship that AI can't automate. Human managers still need to encourage and guide their employees, among other things that AI mentors are still limited in doing.
One thing Sage does not do yet is teach long-form content. For that, Workera relies on partners in the online learning space. However, Sage will identify skills you might be able to learn quickly, and generate a brief scenario and question to test your understanding.
I would argue Workera is stretching the word "mentor" here, and somewhat is using its own definition. That said, Sage may be a useful agent that managers can add to their tool belt to help assess and invest in their workforce.
Workera's CEO Was Mentored By Andrew Ng. Now He Wants An AI Agent To ...
Yahoo is using AI to generate takeaways from this article. This means the info may not always match what's in the article. Reporting mistakes helps us improve the experience.Generate Key Takeaways
Kian Katanforoosh has one of the best mentors in the AI world: renowned researcher Andrew Ng, who also served as his graduate school advisor at Stanford. The two went on to create Stanford's deep learning program, and now Ng serves as chairman of Katanforoosh's startup, Workera. Ng has been a meaningful guide in Katanforoosh's career, but now the Workera CEO is trying to break down what it means to be a good mentor, and automate it through a new AI agent, Sage.
"I trust Andrew because I understand his background and expertise, but how many Andrews are there in the world? Not that many," said Katanforoosh in an interview. "So automating this mentorship aspect was critical."
On Tuesday, Workera announced Sage, an AI agent you can talk with that's designed to assess an employee's skill level, goals, and needs. After taking some short tests, Workera claims Sage will accurately gauge how proficient someone is at a certain skill. Then, Sage can recommend the appropriate online courses through Coursera, Workday, or other learning platform partners. Through chatting with Sage, Workera is designed to meet employees where they are, testing their skills in writing, machine learning, or math, and giving them a path to improve.
A screenshot of Sage.
To be clear, Workera's definition of "mentor" is a hyper-specific one; Katanforoosh acknowledges that Sage will not do everything Ng did for him. Encouragement, career guidance, and networking are hard to automate. But Sage can somewhat objectively assess an employee's skillset, and recommend the right courses to help achieve their goals. While that's not a perfect mentor, it's better than some have access to.
As the son of Iranian immigrants, Katanforoosh's parents were forced to flee their home country during the unstable 1970s, abandoning their studies in the process. His father left a science degree behind and ended up selling clothes in France to make a living. While today's Workera largely serves Fortune 500 employees, Katanforoosh believes that making assessment skills more available could one day help people in his parents' situation.
People are craving mentorship today more than ever. In the era of remote work, young employees receive less face time with experienced colleagues, meaning less chances to catch some nuggets of wisdom by the water cooler. The CEO of Workera thinks the company's new AI agent is up to the task.
Sage will roll out to early access customers as of November 2024, including defense technology provider Booz Allen. Other Workera customers, including the U.S. Air Force and Accenture, will get general access to Sage in March 2025.
Workera has raised more than $44 million to administer AI-generated tests for enterprise employees, offering employers a way to gauge their employees' skillsets. Employees typically don't jump at the chance to be compared to their coworkers, but Workera tries to offer a way for businesses to invest in their employees as well.
An employers perspective using Sage.
Sage does the same thing, but offers a more conversational experience that ties together the Workera platform more neatly. The flexibility of OpenAI's multimodal models, which Workera uses, also offers a flexible interface that's capable of scaling to drastically more tasks in various mediums. Indeed, 95% of Sage's interactions are
With Sage, Workera is claiming to become a mentor for workers, instead of just an administer of skill assessments. A human mentor offers emotional support, encouragement, and connections that an AI chatbot likely never could. However, in some aspects of mentorships, Katanforoosh thinks Sage can be better.
Sage provides benchmarks to mark progress on various skills.
"A good mentor needs to assess properly, because unless the mentor can assess accurately, it cannot help you... That's one that can be automated," said Katanforoosh. "In fact, I'm pretty confident measurement systems we have today are better than most people; I would trust the Workera system much more than I trust myself at measuring someone's machine learning skills."
Another aspect to this is that humans are biased and highly influenced by superficial traits, so they may not always make accurate assessments of someone's talent. AI systems are not perfect either, for the record, and contain many of the same biases as the humans that created them. After all, AI models are mostly based on human-generated data.
But the biases of AI models may have a more promising solution than that of humans. Katanforoosh teaches a course at Stanford which covers bias mitigation methods in AI. He firmly believes there are ways to reduce bias underlying an AI model's data with algorithms. These can weight gender, race, or other considerations in a different way, making the outputs of AI models more equitable.
"I actually feel very confident that AI is already much less biased, but will be even less biased than humans in the coming years," said Workera's CEO.
By automating these tasks, Katanforoosh says managers can be freed up to manage the human aspects of mentorship that AI can't automate. Human managers still need to encourage and guide their employees, among other things that AI mentors are still limited in doing.
One thing Sage does not do yet is teach long-form content. For that, Workera relies on partners in the online learning space. However, Sage will identify skills you might be able to learn quickly, and generate a brief scenario and question to test your understanding.
I would argue Workera is stretching the word "mentor" here, and somewhat is using its own definition. That said, Sage may be a useful agent that managers can add to their tool belt to help assess and invest in their workforce.
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