Presented by Indeed
As AI continues to reshape how we work, organizations are rethinking what skills they need, how they hire, and the way they preserve talent. In response to Indeed’s 2025 Tech Talent report, tech job postings are still down greater than 30% from pre-pandemic highs, yet demand for AI expertise has never been greater. Recent roles are emerging almost overnight, from prompt engineers to AI operations managers, and leaders are under growing pressure to shut skill gaps while supporting their teams through change.
Shibani Ahuja, SVP of enterprise IT strategy at Salesforce; Matt Candy, global managing partner of generative AI strategy and transformation at IBM; and Jessica Hardeman, global head of attraction and engagement at Indeed got here together for a recent roundtable conversation concerning the way forward for tech talent strategy, from hiring and reskilling to the way it's reshaping the workforce.
Strategies for sourcing talent
To search out the fitting candidates, organizations need to make sure their communication is obvious from the get-go, and which means starting with a well-thought-out job description, Hardeman said.
"How clearly are you outlining the abilities which can be actually required for the role, versus using very high-level or ambiguous language," she said. "Something that I also highly recommend is skill-cluster sourcing. We use that to discover candidates that is perhaps adjoining to those harder-to-find area of interest skills. That’s something we will upskill people into. For instance, skills which can be in distributed computing or machine learning frameworks also share other high-value capabilities. Using these clusters may help recruiters discover candidates that won’t have that exact skill set you’re in search of, but can quickly upskill into it."
Recruiters also needs to be upskilled, capable of spot that potential in candidates. And once they're hired, corporations need to be intentional about how they’re growing talent from the day they step within the door.
"What which means within the near term is specializing in the mentorship, embedding that AI fluency into their onboarding experience, into their growth, into their development," she said. "Meaning offering upskilling that teaches not only the tools they’ll need, but the right way to think with those tools and alongside those. The brand new early profession sweet spot is where technical skills meet our human strengths. Curiosity. Communication. Data judgment. Workflow design. Those are the things that AI cannot replicate or replace. We now have to create mentorship and sponsorship opportunities. Well-being and culture are critical components to making sure that we’re creating good places for that early-in-career talent to land."
How work will evolve along AI
As AI becomes embedded into day by day technical work, organizations are rethinking what it means to be a developer, designer, or engineer. As an alternative of automating roles end to finish, corporations are increasingly constructing AI agents that act as teammates, supporting employees across your entire software development lifecycle.
Candy explained that IBM is already seeing this shift in motion through its Consulting Advantage platform, which serves as a unified AI experience layer for consultants and technical teams.
“This can be a platform that each one in all our consultants works with,” he said. “It’s supported by each piece of AI technology and model on the market. It’s the place where our consultants can access hundreds of agents that help them in each job role and activity they’re doing.”
These aren’t just prebuilt tools — teams can create and publish their very own agents into an internal marketplace. That has sparked a scientific effort to map every task across traditional tech roles and construct agents to reinforce them.
“If I take into consideration your traditional designer, DevOps engineer, AI Ops engineer — what are all different agents which can be supporting them in those activities?” Candy said. “It’s excess of just coding. Tools like Cursor, Windsurf, and GitHub Copilot speed up coding, but that’s just one a part of delivering software end to finish. We’re constructing agents to support people at every stage of that journey.”
Candy said this shift leads toward a workplace where AI becomes a collaborative partner relatively than a substitute, something that allows tech employees to spend more time on creative, strategic, and human-centered tasks.
"This future where employees have agents working alongside them, caring for a few of these repetitive activities, specializing in higher-value strategic work where human skills are innately necessary, I believe becomes right at the center of that,” he explained. “You will have to unleash the organization to have the opportunity to think and rethink in that way."
A number of that relies on the mindset of company leaders, Ahuja said.
"I can see the difference between leaders that take a look at AI as cost-cutting, reduction — it’s a bottom-line activity,” she said. “After which there are organizations which can be beginning to shift their mindset to say, no, the goal is just not about replacing people. It’s about reimagining the work to make us humans more human, paradoxically. For some leaders that’s the story their PR teams have told them to say. But for those that really imagine that AI is about helping us develop into more human, it’s interesting how they’re bringing that to life and bridging this gap between humanity and digital labor."
Shifting the culture toward AI
The businesses which can be most successful at navigating the obstacles around successful AI implementation and culture change make employees their first priority, Ahuja added. They prioritize use cases that solve probably the most boring problems which can be burdening their teams, demonstrating how AI will help, versus what the utmost variety of jobs automation can replace.
"They’re considering of it as preserving human accountability, so in high-stakes moments, people will still make that final call," she said. "Taking a look at where AI goes to excel at scale and speed with pattern recognition, leaving that space for humans to bring their judgement, their ethics, and their emotional intelligence. It looks as if a really subtle shift, however it’s pretty big by way of where it starts at the start of a corporation and the way it trickles down."
It's also necessary to construct a level of comfort in using AI in employees’ day-to-day work. Salesforce created a Slack chat called Bite-Sized AI through which they encourage every colleague, including company leaders, to speak about where they're using AI and why, and what hacks they've found.
"That’s making a secure space," Ahuja explained. "It’s creating that psychological safety — that this isn’t only a buzzword. We’re attempting to encourage it through behavior."
"That is all about the way you ignite, especially in big enterprises, the sort of passion and fire inside everyone’s belly," Candy added. "Storytelling, showing examples of what great looks like. The expression is 'demos, not memos'. Stop writing PowerPoint slides explaining what we're going to do and truly moving into the tools to indicate it in real life.”
AI makes that continuous learning a non-negotiable, Hardeman added, with corporations training employees in understanding the right way to use the AI tools they're provided, and that goes a great distance toward constructing that AI culture.
"We view upskilling as a retention lever and a performance driver," she said. "It creates that confidence, it reduces the fear around AI adoption. It helps people see a future for themselves because the technology evolves. AI didn’t just raise the bar on skills. It raised the bar on how we’re attempting to support our people. It’s necessary that we’re also rising to that occasion, and we’re not only raising expectations on the oldsters that we work with."
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