As artificial intelligence (AI) continues to reshape the workforce and redefine roles across industries, businesses must urgently rethink how they reskill and prepare their workforce. Not only in technical skills, but also in the cross-functional knowledge needed to thrive in an AI-driven future.
The Office for National Statistics calculates that up to 1.5 million jobs in England are at high risk of some duties being automated. Meanwhile, the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 expects 39% of core skills will change by 2030. This means that reskilling is no longer a “nice to have”. It is the difference between employees keeping pace or falling behind and businesses sinking or swimming.
Automation’s double-edged sword
Automation no longer lives solely on factory floors. It now scrutinises loan books, monitors cyber risks, and flags faults in telecoms networks. This shift cuts costs and errors, but raises fresh challenges, as regulators still expect human experts to defend every AI decision. Models can ‘hallucinate’ and return incorrect answers, and roles such as AI auditor or prompt engineer, almost completely unknown five years ago, have become pertinent.
But while the technology is ready, talent remains the bottleneck. Only 23% of UK organisations believe their leaders can navigate this change, according to Deloitte’s 2024 survey.
What’s more, constantly rehiring as technology evolves is both slow and expensive, especially as salaries for AI specialists continue to rise. One solution is retraining loyal staff to keep valuable knowledge in-house, and in turn, avoiding recruitment fees and ramp-up delays, and lifting morale by showing employees they have a future in the organisation.
Building an AI-ready organisation
AI training must be a cross-department, cross-organisational endeavour. In the grand scheme of its future trajectory, AI is relatively new, and everyone needs some form of learning around it. Finance, marketing, risk, and ops all need to understand and speak the same shared language so they can chase new revenue, cut costs, and manage risk together. Meanwhile, older, existing managers will need to lead teams of digital natives who may have greater experience of AI than themselves, but still bear the responsibility of compliant, ethical adoption.
Knowing what to teach and when
Of course, AI skills training must go far beyond coding. Boards must weigh on ethics and budgets, managers must question AI results and act upon them, and junior staff will need to use prompt tools to speed up administrative tasks. Building cross-organisational learning routes that blend the basics (how AI models work and how to govern them) with hands-on, job-specific skills links training to real business results and keeps everyone on track.
mthree is pioneering in this space by integrating tailored AI training into its tried-and-tested hire-train-deploy and reskilling models, and tailoring them to become a more circular, evolving approach. We’ve seen just how quickly AI technology is evolving, so training shouldn’t be a one-off; mthree offers refreshed training every six months, mixing quick-hit lessons for everyone with hands-on labs for specialists and strategy sessions for leaders.
Building compliance into every lesson, trainees should be taught to practise testing models for bias, log data sources, and create audit trails from day one. By training everybody across a given organisation to engage and utilise AI in the same way from the outset, compliance becomes ingrained in working culture and helps to mitigate risk. This “governance-first” approach means no costly fixes later and smoother conversations with regulators and clients.
Culture and strategic outlook
AI will not replace humans, but people who can use AI effectively will likely replace those who don’t. The race is on to close the gap between emerging technology and human capability. mthree’s mission is to bridge that gap by combining targeted training, rapid deployment, and ongoing support so organisations can turn disruption into a competitive advantage. The skills race has already begun, and those who act with intention today will set the benchmarks that others scramble to meet tomorrow.
