actually presented
As AI is reshaping the way we work, organizations are rethinking what skills they need, how they hire and how they retain talent. According to Indeed’s 2025 Tech Talent Report, tech job postings are still down more than 30% from pre-pandemic highs, yet demand for AI expertise has never been higher. New roles are emerging almost overnight, from agile engineers to AI operations managers, and leaders are under increasing pressure to bridge the skills gap while supporting their teams through change.
Shibani Ahuja, SVP of enterprise IT strategy at Salesforce; Matt Candy, global managing partner of generic AI strategy and transformation at IBM; and Jessica Hardman, global head of attraction and engagement at Indeed, recently came together for a roundtable conversation about the future of tech talent strategy, from recruiting and reskilling to reshaping the workforce.
Strategies for Talent Sourcing
Hardman said that to find the right candidates, organizations need to make sure their communication is clear from the start, and that means starting with a well-thought-out job description.
"How clearly you are outlining the skills that are actually required for the role, versus using very high-level or vague language," He said. "Something I highly recommend is skill-cluster sourcing. We use this to identify candidates who may be associated with these hard-to-find specific skills. This is something in which we can increase people’s skills. For example, skills present in distributed computing or machine learning frameworks also share other high-value capabilities. Using these groups can help recruiters identify candidates who may not have the exact skill set you are looking for, but can quickly develop skills in."
Recruiters must also be skilled and able to recognize that potential in candidates. And once they’re hired, companies need to be intentional about how they’re cultivating that talent from the day they walk in the door.
"What that means in the near term is to focus on mentorship, incorporating that AI flow into their onboarding experience, into their development, into their development." He said. "This means offering upskilling that teaches not only the tools they will need, but how to think with and through those tools. The new hotbed of careers is where technical skills meet our human strengths. Curiosity Communications. data decisions. Workflow Design. These are things that AI cannot replicate or replace. We have to create opportunities for mentorship and sponsorship. Wellbeing and culture are key components to ensuring we are creating great places for early career talent to thrive."
How work will evolve with AI
As AI becomes more and more embedded in daily technology tasks, organizations are rethinking what it means to be a developer, designer, or engineer. Instead of automating roles from start to finish, companies are increasingly building AI agents that act as teammates, supporting workers throughout the entire software development lifecycle.
Candy points out that IBM is already seeing this change through its Consulting Advantage platform, which acts as a unified AI experience layer for consultants and technical teams.
“It’s a platform that every one of our advisors works with,” he said. “It’s supported by every piece of AI technology and models. This is where our advisors can access thousands of agents who help them in every work role and activity.”
These aren’t just prebuilt tools – teams can create and publish their own agents to the internal marketplace. This has led to a systematic effort to map every task to traditional technical roles and create agents to augment them.
“If I think about your traditional designer, DevOps engineer, AI Ops engineer – what are all those different agents that are supporting them in those activities?” Candy said. “It’s more than just coding. Tools like Cursor, Windsurf, and GitHub Copilot accelerate coding, but that’s only one part of delivering software from start to finish. We’re building agents to support people at every step of that journey.”
Candy said this shift leads to a workplace where AI becomes a collaborative partner rather than a replacement, something that enables tech employees to spend more time on creative, strategic and human-centered tasks.
"This future where employees have agents working with them, taking care of some of these repetitive activities, focused on higher-value strategic tasks where human skills are inherently important, I think is at the heart of that,” he explained. “You have to free up the organization to be able to think and rethink in that way."
Ahuja said, a lot depends on the mindset of the company leaders.
"I can see the difference between leaders who see AI as cost-cutting, reduction – it’s a bottom-up activity,” she said. ”And then there are organizations that are starting to change their mindset to say, no, the goal is not to replace people. Ironically, it is about reimagining the work of us humans to make them more humane. For some politicians, this is the story their PR teams have told them to tell. But for those who really believe that AI is about helping us become more human, it’s interesting how they are bringing it to life and bridging this gap between humanity and digital labor."
Shifting culture towards AI
Ahuja said the companies that are most successful in overcoming the barriers around successful AI implementation and culture change are the ones that make employees their first priority. They prioritize use cases that solve the most boring problems that are burdening their teams, demonstrating how AI will help, rather than looking at what automation of the maximum number of jobs can replace.
"They’re thinking of it as preserving human accountability, so in high-risk moments, people will still make the final decisions," He said. "Given that AI is going to excel in scale and speed with pattern recognition, that will leave room for humans to bring their own judgment, their own ethics, and their own emotional intelligence. This seems like a very subtle change, but it is huge in terms of where an organization starts and how it moves forward."
It is also important to create a comfort level for employees in using AI in their day-to-day work. Salesforce created a Slack chat called Byte-Sized AI in which they encourage every coworker, including company leaders, to talk about where and why they’re using AI, and what hacks they’ve found.
"He is creating a safe place," Ahuja explained. "It’s building that psychological safety – that it’s not just a buzzword. We are trying to encourage this through behavior."
"It’s all about how you ignite, especially in larger enterprises, what kind of passion and fire is inside everyone’s belly," Added candy. "Telling stories, showing examples of what great looks like. The expression is ‘demo, not memo’. Stop writing PowerPoint slides to explain what we’re going to do and get into the tools to actually show it in real life.
AI makes continuous learning non-negotiable, Hardman said, adding that companies provide training to employees to understand how to use the AI tools they provide, and this goes a long way toward building that AI culture.
"We view skills upgrading as a retention lever and a performance driver," He said. "It builds confidence, it reduces fear around AI adoption. As technology evolves, it helps people see their future. AI didn’t just raise skill levels. It raised the bar on how we’re trying to support our people. It’s important that we also rise to the occasion, and that we’re not just raising expectations of the people we work with."
Sponsored articles are content produced by a company that is either paying for the post or that has a business relationship with VentureBeat, and they are always clearly marked. Contact for more information sales@venturebeat.com,
<a href