 Hello, and welcome to this episode of The Analyst Angle. I'm Shelly Kramer, Managing Director and Principal Analyst here at theCUBE Research, and today our show is going to focus on AI reskilling and the intersection of society and technology, no small topic to be sure. And this really kind of came out of some news that came out of Microsoft about a week ago where they announced plans to train two million people in India with skills in AI by 2025. You know, obviously as countries and governments and organizations across the world race to ramp up their investments in AI, there's a very real need to future-proof workers and also to address, you know, and a lot of how Microsoft positioned this as a goal to address inequality as fears of jobs being killed off, stand a very real chance of deepening those inequalities. In Microsoft's case, this training will be delivered in partnership with governments and organizations, nonprofits and communities, and it's intended to help the future workforce harness AI's potential. So when news of that was circulating a little bit on the interwebs, I happened to cross some conversations with some fellow industry veterans and analysts and I thought it would be a great topic for us to address in this show. So with that, I am pleased to welcome my guests, Betty Junod and Sarbjit Johal to the show. Guys, welcome, it's great to have you. Hello, hello, I'm happy to be here. Absolutely, thanks. Well, you know, before we dive into our conversation, let me have each one of you just do a brief intro of yourselves and kind of a little bit about your background. I do have to say when Betty and I were talking about this in advance of the show, she described herself as a tech industry veteran and opinionist. So I needed to say that out loud because in case she leaves that out of her description of herself, I think that's kind of brilliant. So Betty, take it away. Thank you, Shelly. So Betty Junod, happy to be here. I have worked at major tech companies like VMware, Docker, Seloio, really kind of at the early stages of when they're just dropping the industry, and specifically in marketing and go-to-market roles, hence, you know, the catchy tech opinionist title. I love it. I love it. And Sarbjit? Yeah, thanks, Shelly again. Betty, nice to be with you again today. I see myself as a technology strategist. I have done a lot of work as a developer in the industry and then a lot of pre-sales work at operations companies at VMware, at EMC, at Oracle Cloud and in Rackspace and places like that. And mostly technology focused but technology strategy in sort of, if you want to be precise. I'm an economics major who fell into technology when I came to US in 1994. So I put that angle on in my talks and in my analysis. Absolutely, I think that makes perfect sense. Well, I will say that I spent 27 years of my career as a marketing brand strategist. So I feel like, you know, I think that one of the things that's so interesting about, you know, sort of a team approach to analyst relations, you know, and I know that you both, we both do a lot of things with the two of you, but for our team here at theCUBE Research, you know, we've got the analysts to our former product managers and we've got analysts to our former analysts with gigantic firms. And then we've got somebody like me who brings the marketing and brand strategy expertise to the table. And so it's always interesting to see sort of how you need all of those skill sets, I think, along the way, you know? Yeah, absolutely. Make a well-rounded organization. Absolutely. So let's go back to this Microsoft announcement. Okay, now, you know, I very much, again, this is not, you know, this is not something that Microsoft is the only company doing and not to take anything away from their movie. I think this is important and timely. But I think that, you know, in general, technology vendors feel a responsibility to lead this reskilling effort. I would very much agree with that. One of the things I think that interested me in having both of you on this show to talk about this though, is that, you know, Sergey, in the conversation that was taking place on Twitter around this, one of the things that you mentioned that I thought was particularly interesting was you talked about the importance of Microsoft, Google Cloud, Amazon, Meta, Apple, and others creating what you called skills gravity for their platforms. Will you talk a little bit about that? Yeah, sure. Actually, that was under the premise of what I call it, bigger the system, more self-healing it is. Actually, when we talk about loss of jobs versus a new technology coming to the picture and then why these vendors train these people. And it's not that they want to do some social welfare. It's not, you know, just some, you know, noble idea they have. They want to improve their business. Just by, in order to improve their business, they have to train new people on their technology stacks. And that helps people to get that training, new entrants as well as people who needs to be retrained on new technologies. So the system sort of self-heals for the most part, right? That was my premise. And the idea of skills gravity, actually I can remember that sort of term about like, I think four or five years back when everybody was talking about the data gravity in cloud and I started talking about the skills gravity as well because in a nutshell, practitioners invest in stacks as well, just as the enterprises which consume technology they do. So once they pick a stack or a platform, they get training in it. They want to continue with that unless that thing is dying or flattening out or going out of fashion, technology like fashion, we never done with it actually. That's another thing which is a good one-liner. So just to get that skills, people skilled, what I call skills gravity, that helps vendors sort of make more sales and keep more business with them just like data gravity in cloud context we were talking for in context for AWS, right? And then Microsoft came as number two and then Google Cloud is number three. So similarly, the training creates that skills gravity for vendors, VMware had bunch of certified professionals, Cisco had all back in the day a lot of professional CCNA and all that certifications. So that keeps people there with their stacks. So that's what, that was my idea of skills gravity. Yeah, I mean- I would love to hear from you both actually how you see that. Yeah, I think that you make some valid points. I will say that one of the things that caught my eye about the Microsoft announcement is that part of their release on this said that their commitment included partnering with national and state governments to give basic advanced AI training to 500,000 students and job seekers. Okay, I get that. In-depth AI technical training for 100,000 young women and raising awareness of responsible AI use and AI enabled caregivers for 400,000 students in schools in remote and tribal areas. So I totally agree with you that in many instances, this is a self-serving act by technology vendors. I absolutely, keeping people trained on your products and all of that sort of makes perfect sense, right? And yet I do also feel that these vendors feel a responsibility to invest in reskilling initiatives. But I thought this in particular, this focusing on young women, focusing on caregivers for students in remote and tribal areas. I think that's an important part of the equation here that kudos to Microsoft for this. And again, Microsoft is not the only technology vendor focusing on these kind of communities and things like that. But I think that's an important part of this that I wanna be sure that we recognize. Yeah, and when you think about that, I think the thing that's interesting is that because the announcement also focused on addressing inequity. So I think that that really nods to like the different populations. One of the other things is to what Sarabjeet just talked about, like having these vendors, making training readily available, things like VMware and Cisco, some of the examples he provided is like, those are highly specialized technical skill sets. Some things with AI, the way that especially with generative AI and how it can be used now, it's so much more readily accessible in a way to the non-technical user. So how can I? Yeah, I just logging into a website. How can I better ask a question to jumpstart an interest I may have as a young person in a topic that maybe formal training or education on that is not available in my region? But you know what, I have a mobile phone. I have my hand at all times. Yeah, that gives me access to the internet. It gives me power in ways that some of the other, doing like a major networking infrastructure class over a phone is very different than asking an AI, a generative AI client to like teach me about XYZ topic. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I just want to highlight what Betty just said, great point actually. It's a highly accessible technology, but AI itself can train you to use AI better. So AI in many ways can train you to do better AI. You can use it in more effective ways, but also you can learn other technical skills using AI. So it's very versatile technology. It's a augmentation for human sort of cognitive abilities. That's what I see it. Yeah, absolutely. Betty, I know that you said that you had spent a little time doing some research about kind of what's ahead in the workplace and one of the stats that you highlighted was that there's expected to be an 85 million person shortage of software engineers. I mean, that's no small number, but I'd love it if you'd share a little bit more of some of the information that you have accessed as we prepared for this conversation. Yeah, I was looking up some things around the available talent and skills, right? Especially along this topic of how can AI help re-skill the workforce? And it was a fascinating statistic from the US Labor Department saying that by 2030, which is now only a handful of years away, the global shortage of software engineers may reach 85 million. And that's across companies like your bank, right? The banks that we're working with, grocery stores, two companies like Microsoft, Google, AWS, so it's everybody all in. Across all those jobs, they're trying to, you know, software engineers to create products that, you know, will generate revenue, you know, generate revenue for those companies, you know, paychecks for the people and help grow the global economy. And so when you look at it from that perspective, it's fascinating. So can these technologies help, you know, shorten or jumpstart the individual to learn the skills? Also, how do we teach them to better use something like AI to help better solve their problems? There's some other studies out there and it escapes me on exactly where I had seen it, but, you know, senior engineers tend to have better outcomes. Their productivity is vastly improved using generated AI versus a beginner developer, mostly because a senior engineer main has a better context for the kind of questions to ask. So in some ways... Yeah, that makes perfect sense. Yeah, if you know a little more about context, I can ask better questions. So one of the things might be is when you're training people with GenAI, it's like, how can, how do we change how we ask questions, what we do to make, to get the most out of this tool, you know, get better use out of the tool to help us in our workflow. There's a whole cottage industry here that is springing up and just like learning how to query, right? I mean, because if you don't know how to query, you know, you're only gonna get out what you put in, right? And so it's really interesting. And the other thing that I think is interesting that I see, I have twin daughters who are high school seniors. And so, you know, I'm involved in the college parent conversations and things like that. It's fascinating to me how many young people are going into fields that are expected to be highly impacted by AI that have no idea about this. So they're not planning around this journalism as one of them. And by the way, I'm not discouraging anybody from, you know, majoring in journalism, but if you're gonna major in journalism, you really need to understand what's going on in the industry, right? As you kind of start to make career plans. And I think another thing that we hear a lot about are, you know, is the statement that gendered AI is going to replace coders because, you know, it does it so much better and everything else. Well, the reality of it is that's really not true. You know, is Gen AI going to work alongside humans and software engineers in creating, you know, better iterations of software more rapidly? Probably. Is it gonna do away with software engineers in general? Absolutely not. So it's just kind of interesting to see how this is evolving. We don't have enough software engineers anyways. Yeah, I think somebody came over to the crowd. Go ahead, please. Oh, no, I was just gonna say we don't have enough software engineers anyways. So the idea that we can, you know, get more out of, be able to augment the people that are trying to develop software with AI, it's good for all of us. Yeah, absolutely. Sarbjit, what were you going to say? I think somebody came up with this clever one line and it says, it's not that Gen AI or AI will replace you. It's a person who knows Gen AI will replace you. 100%. It's always person who will replace you, but not the technology. Right, well, that's what I mean about the cottage industry and learning queries. And, you know, I was on a briefing yesterday with the team at a big technology company. And one of the things that they were asking us was, you know, what are we hearing in the market as it relates to AI? What do we think that customers are struggling with and challenged by and everything else? And, you know, one of our responses was that, you know, a lot of technology firms are offering, you know, will help get you started with your Gen AI instances throughout the organization. And my comments on that was, you know, I think customers are looking for more than will help get you started because this is a whole new frontier. And I think that the technology vendors who are best positioned to grab market share in this economy today are the people who treat this as a partnership and who truly will slide it alongside teams and not only help you get started, but help you get the, you know, the best and the quickest ROI out of your investment in all things related to AI. Absolutely. Yeah, I totally agree. I think the vendors who can train more people quickly, they will reap the benefits of their stock being out there more quickly. And they will gain the market share. That's how it goes. Well, that's skills gravity. Yeah, skills gravity, right? And creating the most skills gravity for their stock. That's what it is. Exactly, yeah. Well, and you know, I mentioned this earlier in the conversation, but I just share here that Google Cloud has a new Gen AI training program and they have like seven or eight courses that you can take for free to learn Gen AI. And on a bigger scale, IBM who went all in on AI famously quite a while ago, making announcements that remember when Arvin said that hiring was going to shut down in any areas where, you know, Gen AI could play a role and, you know, that kind of set shockwaves through the industry. But, you know, IBM's research purposes value found that their executives estimated about 40% of their workforce would need to reskill over the next three years due to AI and automation. And so, and this was something that they said in October of 2023, IBM's made a commitment to train two million people, two million workers in AI in three years. And they are also focused on underrepresented communities and equitable access as a priority so that no one is left behind. IBM also offers a bunch of skills build courses. Amazon is another one and Amazon has long had initiatives as it have many tech vendors in high schools and even in middle schools kind of helping to train the next gen of tech workers. But in September of 2021, so a couple of years ago, Amazon committed 1.2 billion to provide 300,000 employees with access to education and skills training programs, including college tuition for frontline employees. And this was through 2025 as part of their upscaling, Amazon upscaling pledge. So this is their own employees, which I think is really important. And so, you know, we are seeing technology vendors really stepping up. And, but, you know, as you both have said, this is certainly something that is not an altruistic effort. This is something that makes good business sense. Makes good business sense for them because they need the employees to keep their businesses going forward. But in order, you know, all the training for those outside their organization focuses on their adoption. But when you have disruptive technologies like this, just how we do things change. So not just what we use, but how we do things. So it makes good sense for, you know, the more we can get everybody using things responsibly together, it kind of, it can, it's done the right way. It could unlock more for industry as a whole. Yeah, absolutely. Sarbjean, what do you think? Yeah, I think if we were talking about numbers, actually, I wrote down before we turned the cameras on and we'll prep. In June 2020, Microsoft said, we will train 25 million people with digital skills. Like in December 2020, during the event, AWS said we will train 29 million people on AWS cloud-related sort of technologies. October 2021, Google said 40 million. That's the number they gave for cloud skills. Like it's not for digital skills, cloud skills, like more precise. And two days ago, Google, there's news heading the wire. Two days ago, Google pumps $27 million into AI training after Microsoft says what they are training like two million people or something like that in India, you know, rural parts of India or small towns of India. And actually it depends who the vendor is, what technology they provide, if it's B2C or B2B, and how accessible that technology is, as Betty said earlier, right? So if it's very accessible, people will learn that faster and it will, you know, spread like wildfire. But if you're learning Oracle, you know, database, you know, you wanna be Oracle DBA, you know, DBs are dying sort of persona, but you know, if you wanna be good at Oracle database, you can't learn it. Like there's no way that you can go, you know, online and get it, right? So you have to have, you have to work somewhere, right? Most of the time, right? So that was a traditional sort of way, these vendors like locked doors, not giving you access to their technology. So all those vendors are kind of shrinking in size and their influence, I will say. I think it's the age of opening up and, you know, giving free access to the practitioners early on. That's how you put your technology out there. And actually that's a, when I talk to the vendors, that's my number one suggestion to them is like, you know, train, train, train, train as much as people you can train on your stocks and that will do you, that will do you know, like a magical favor to you as a vendor. Please hold. Yeah. You know, we did a research study for an automation vendor a handful of years ago. And one of the things that I thought was so interesting about this particular study, a lot of times when you do research, brands want survey responses from senior leaders, executives, CIOs, CTOs, that sort of thing. And what this particular technology vendor was interested in was more mid-level and frontline workers. And the conversation, the topic was all around automation and AI and how that was changing the workplace. And it was so interesting to, I felt like it was so interesting to come at it from that viewpoint. And what we learned was that, of course in many instances, we hear AI is going to displace workers and AI is gonna take jobs and all of that sort of thing. And the reality of it is, technology alone is never the answer. And this is something that I've said a million times since we started talking about digital transformation in the last decade, right? I mean, technology alone is not the answer. It's a combination of people, processes and technology that make the magic happen. But it was really interesting to get feedback from the employees at this level within an organization because what they said resoundingly was that, we're excited about this and we want to level up our training. And we so look forward to, but we look forward to learning new skills, but we also wanna be a part of the conversation around this, you know, we're on the front lines. We're the people who are interacting with customers. Maybe it's in a contact center or maybe it's somewhere else where we're having direct customer feedback or interface. But I thought that was really interesting, like involve us in the conversations, let us contribute our knowledge and our insights as you make decisions about these things. And then of course, you know, where you end up when you do that is you have more rapid adoption, you have better informed employees. You know, you kind of, I think you kind of create a culture of innovation when you approach integrating AI and Gen AI into your business operations. But that always stuck with me. I thought that was really a smart way to go about it. But equally important is I've had conversations with some of those employees. And this is actually even before Gen AI became a thing and we were talking about RPA being, you know, kind of a low code, no code solutions being introduced throughout organizations and I've had so many conversations with people who've shared things like, you know, I just had an ordinary average job and I had an opportunity to learn how to do this and how to learn, you know, to write, you know, how to create bots and create animations throughout the organization. And it's just like, and now I'm in a position where I'm kind of like an ambassador and I'm teaching other people in the organization how to do this. And I'm just like, I've never loved my job anymore. Like this is so exciting. So there, I think there are amazing opportunities ahead in the workplace for people. And it really just kind of depends on how we approach that in terms of what kind of outcomes we see. Absolutely. I think when you talk to, like you said, the people in the front lines, they can probably give more concrete use cases to player. AI, you know, these various AI use cases can be used to, you know, make things more efficient, help, you know, get to issue resolution faster and things. Yeah, I know. Well, you know, Betty, as the, you know, the conversation that this conversation started because I saw the news about Microsoft and I saw you commenting on it, Sarbjeet. And then I saw you popping in and commenting, Betty. And one of the statements that you made was, you know, this intersection of society and technology, it's complicated. So as we get ready to wrap our show, do you have any final thoughts on that? It's complicated. So I think it's one of those things in that for society as a whole to advance, it needs to go together with the concerns of just the humans and the concerns of commerce. Because it's not, they're not mutually exclusive. So I think what, and we have consumers. Yes. Yeah. Customers, the people that work at the work there, the customers, you know, just looking at all of it as one giant ecosystem, right? So it's good to see these kind of initiatives being announced early on in this wave. Yeah, absolutely. Sarbjeet, do you have any final thoughts or advice? Strategic advice for our viewing and listing audience? Definitely, actually. I think the number one advice in this context that you can give is like always, always be learning actually, you know? So humans actually, human progress we have made, you know, we have rockets now from starting with a fire and lever of those basic innovations to where we are today. We built on top of existing innovations. So if we don't learn about the sort of what's happening now, the new innovations coming down the pike, and it's a convergence of many factors with what makes new things happen. So you guys and girls need to keep your eyes and ears open to what's happening around you. Even if you are specializing in, let's say finance, you need to learn a little bit about how the factories work and what's happening new and material sizes. So the importance of interdisciplinary learning is, I think it's very important these days. Like you gotta understand how all these different things will be put together, especially when AI will be answering most of our questions going forward. Like we have a knowledge of positive knowledge. The cost of knowledge is going down towards zero and going forward. So what we will do as humans is like put these things together and make sure that converges to all these, you know, advancements or helping humanity. So I think that's what my advice is. I think that's terrific advice. I think that the thing that I will leave the audience with is that I think that we need to remind ourselves that generative AI produced information is not necessarily the holy grail. And, you know, certainly not today, right? And so sometimes, you know, it's, what is the trust but verify adage or whatever. You know, a lot of times I do queries or I look things up on perplexity or whatever else. And, you know, it's just an interesting time because you really have to work sometimes a little harder to get to the veracity of what it is you're looking at and figure out, is this 100% accurate? Is there room, is there some wiggle room here? Is there some bias here? I think those are the kind of things at these early stages that we need to keep in mind. Yeah, I want to just, this is an amusing quote from Grady Butch, who's IBM fellow. He said, a fool with a tool is still a fool. Which is very cat key to the phase, right? So like, don't be fooled by the tool, right? So like, what it means is like, you have to know the context of what these tools are meant to be used. So the context is important. Your domain knowledge will actually set you apart and there's no shortcuts and there's no compression algorithm for experience, you know, what Andy Jassy of Amazon says, right? So yeah, put your hours in, work hard, understand the domains you are in. Keep learning. Always, keep learning and always go to the history. Like I tell the kids when they go to colleges and tell them, if you really want to know, if you really want to excel in your career and whatever domain, know the history of that domain. Where does it come from? What happened in the beginning? It actually works like magic once you know. Here's your password. I think that makes perfect sense. And I love the fool with a tool is still a fool. I love it. Well, Benny Junod and Sarbji Johal, thank you so much for joining me today. And I might not have mentioned that you both are members of our CUBE collective family of industry analysts and strategists and thought leaders and we are so happy to have you as part of that community. And this is a topic that I am sure we will be talking on for a long time to come. But thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you, Shelley. Thanks, Shelley. Appreciate it. Thanks, Ben.