Blog

Blog

As students return to classrooms, C-suite leaders must recognize a fundamental shift: We’re educating the first generation that will work alongside AI as a standard business tool. The skills gap between traditional education and workplace reality is widening rapidly. For example, undergraduate students surveyed in 2024 overwhelmingly believed it is essential to have good AI skills, yet only 36% had received support from their institution to develop them.

Today’s students need more than technical proficiency; they require AI literacy as a core competency. This means understanding how to prompt, collaborate with, and audit AI systems effectively. Universities are already integrating AI ethics, machine learning fundamentals, and human-AI collaboration into curricula across disciplines.

The most valuable future employees will excel in uniquely human capabilities that complement AI: complex problem-solving, emotional intelligence, creative thinking, and cross-functional collaboration. They’ll need to be prompt engineers, AI trainers, and data interpreters while maintaining critical thinking skills to validate AI outputs.

At Moore, we’re leading this charge as an integrated communications agency by exposing our interns, externs, and employees to AI tools and solutions. Internally, we’re teaching them to use AI to roleplay as different customer segments to pressure-test messaging, draft social media posts, and A/B test concepts for email subject lines. Externally, we’re collaborating with colleges and universities to advance workforce education around AI applications and advocating for responsible K-12 AI integration that strengthens human connection and critical thinking rather than replacing them.

We’d like to challenge your organization to join us in enhancing development of both your current and future workforce. You could:

• Audit your current workforce AI readiness. Survey employees on their current AI tool usage and comfort levels, and identify departments where AI could immediately boost productivity. Aim to benchmark against industry standards for AI adoption in your sector. 
• Prioritize AI adoption for your team. Implement AI training and ongoing professional development. Dedicate time for teams to experiment with AI tools relevant to their roles; create internal “AI champions” who can train colleagues; and partner with HR to identify which roles need immediate AI upskilling. When hiring, include practical AI scenarios in interviews (e.g., “How would you use AI to research the competitive landscape for a company?”)
•  Launch a “future workforce” partnership program. Connect with local school boards, colleges, and universities to create internship, externship, and apprenticeship programs focused on AI application. Offer to be a guest speaker at local schools on practical AI use in your industry.

Our approach demonstrates how agencies can bridge the education gap—not just by using AI internally, but by actively shaping how the next generation learns to harness these technologies responsibly. We’re proving that AI adoption and human-centered values aren’t mutually exclusive.

The question isn’t whether your future workforce will use AI—it’s whether they’ll be prepared to use it strategically, responsibly, and in ways that amplify rather than diminish human potential.