ChatGPT is changing the skills set for tech workers

AI is transforming business and demanding a new kind of technology professional.

Carter Busse, CIO at Workato

ChatGPT and other AI applications are set to change the profile of IT workers as companies seek more generalists with the so-called soft skills of communication and leadership rather than technical capacity.

That’s the view of Carter Busse, chief information officer at US-based company Workato, which automates business workflows and facilitates data transfer between platforms.

Busse, who has spent more than 30 years working in Silicon Valley, says once he hired people with very specific technical experience, in networking or as a developer.

“There weren’t the tools and applications out there to allow me to hire generalists,” he says from his office in Mountain View, California.

“But now 30 years later, I don’t really look for deep technical skills any more. I look for people who have leadership skills and those soft skills.

“Can they talk the business, can they articulate what the business problem is with a business user? People skills, high EQ mindset.”

Busse says leadership – even for those who are not line managers – is about “being in front of the conversations and owning decisions”.

The search for soft skills is interesting as tech giants have started laying off staff, leaving highly qualified, skilled workers looking for jobs just as tech is disrupted by increasingly automated processes and AI platforms such as ChatGPT.

Busse says a younger generation is emerging from education with non-technical degrees but knowing how to use technology.

Older executives need to embrace that cohort and enable them with good technology to allow them to build “amazing” products, he argues.

“Because, if you don’t they’re going to walk, they’re going to walk,” he says.

Workato is a distributed company with a hiring policy of “remote first”, which means it hires people with good education and good communication skills living in lower-cost countries in India, Europe and Asia.

Busse says he’s learning he doesn’t have to be “the guy in the office “ five days a week.

“I have a lot of my teams in Singapore and the Phillippines,” he says. “ Finding just amazing talent there.”

As well as hiring remote workers, Workato has signed up to The Mom Project, a digital talent marketplace “that connects professionally accomplished women with world- class companies”.

The project identifies women, for example, who who want part-time work and can be introduced to tech jobs.

Busse says a big change in his career in tech is the focus on analysing and using the “massive” amounts of data collected by firms, but he warns the new challenge facing companies is to ensure the data is sound.

“If your data is wrong, the answers you get back from AI bots is going to be completely incorrect,” he says. “We have hundreds of millions of records in our data warehouse but I (don’t) truly believe our data quality is very good. So I’m a big proponent of building the right governance and data quality within our data model.

“There’s AI that actually looks at your data and tries to find data anomalies, or data discrepancies.

“People think (ChatGPT) is the Bible now, but actually it’s not.

“If you want to build a product that people trust, especially in AI, you have to have the right data, it’s all about data.”

Busse says the rapid development in AI “scares me and excites me at the same time. I love, love, love technology. I read about all the latest stuff – and it scares me. AI is challenging us ethically. How far can we take it? How far can we believe it?

“I think we do need to put some regulations on it.

“People are using AI to choose the right person for a job (but) what data are they looking at? Can we actually see what the AI is thinking? How did you get to choose Carter for this role? What were the steps you went through?

“I think there’s going to be a lot of talk over the next several years (about regulation of AI).”