Microsoft and the nation’s largest federation of labor unions, the AFL-CIO, announced a partnership late last year to give workers more of a say about how artificial intelligence impacts their jobs. Neither group released specifics, but pledged to collaborate on worker-centered AI design and policies on ethics and skill development.
The plan’s third prong — and the one receiving the least attention — may have the greatest immediate impact on the workforce: boosting basic AI literacy. Microsoft said it will provide labor leaders and workers with “formal learning opportunities on the latest and prospective developments in AI,” including on-demand digital resources and “learning sessions” with Microsoft’s AI experts.
The Big Idea: The partnership comes as economists and workforce development experts warn of a coming employment disruption: AI may replace millions of jobs and fundamentally change millions more, requiring a level of training not seen since the Industrial Revolution.
But it also comes as fewer than 1 in 10 workers say they’ve experienced AI through their jobs, and only 32% of adults have even the most basic understanding of how large language models like ChatGPT work. Given the AFL-CIO’s 12M members, the partnership has the potential to become the largest single effort to boost AI literacy within the U.S. workforce.
Such efforts are critical at this juncture, experts like Alex Swartsel say. Robotics and basic chatbots have been remaking jobs on factory floors and call centers for years, but it may yet be years before most Americans start to see major changes from generative AI. But they need to start preparing now.
That’s especially true for women, Black and Latino workers, and those in low-income roles who are the most likely to be left behind, says Swartsel, a managing director at Jobs for the Future who’s leading the launch of the organization’s Center for Artificial Intelligence & the Future of Work. The Microsoft and AFL-CIO partnership has “extraordinary potential” to do that groundwork, she says.
“Hopefully it will lead to not just more people having access to these skills, but to better technology, which is what we all need and will benefit from down the road,” she says.
Big Splash, Few Details
When the partnership announcement originally hit in December, it got a lot of attention. But details were, and still are, thin.
It’s unclear what workers will learn when the education effort begins in winter 2024. Microsoft declined to elaborate on the details of the partnership, referring Work Shift to a press release and a live stream of the Dec. 11 announcement. The AFL-CIO didn’t respond to email requests for specifics.
The announcement emphasizes “cooperative labor-management relationships,” noting a neutrality agreement baked into the partnership that prevents Microsoft from thwarting unionization efforts and the importance of including “workers’ perspectives” as the company designs AI technologies.
Both organizations also will support expanding registered apprenticeships, especially those in what it calls “nontraditional tech occupations.” Such apprenticeships have taken a hit with the turbulent couple of years in the tech industry, fueled in no small part by the rise of AI. And both will advocate for more funding for career and technical education programs, something likely to resonate with the AFL-CIO-affiliated American Federation of Teachers, which has 1.7M members.
AI Literacy: While the announcement doesn’t explicitly use the term “AI literacy” to describe its workforce-based education initiative, it’s clear that the plan includes equipping workers with the most basic information on this emerging technology.
Experts from Microsoft will “provide access to information about how AI works and where it’s going, outline its opportunities and analyze the potential challenges,” the announcement says. The company also will offer access to on-demand online resources, though neither organization said what that will look like.
It’s perhaps slim on details, experts say, because nobody really knows where this is going. The technology is developing rapidly, and it’s so new that many companies still haven’t determined the important training questions, says Ben Armstrong, co-director of MIT’s Working Group on Generative AI and the Work of the Future.
“Some relevant education and educational material just can’t exist yet because we just don’t have the data,” he says. “This is like teaching people about the impact and best practices of mRNA vaccines while the trials are still going.”
The Players: For its part, Microsoft has a vested interest in boosting AI literacy in general and generative AI literacy more specifically. The company plans to invest more than $10B in and owns a 49% share of OpenAI, developer of the quickly evolving generative AI tool ChatGPT. It also continues to expand its Azure AI portfolio for businesses, and in January rolled out Copilot Pro, a premium version of its chatbot.
Historically, organized labor has played an important role in vouching for management-initiated training programs. Though they’re intended to boost productivity, these programs have the added bonus of equipping workers with essential—and transferable—skills.
Because many workers fear the growing role AI will play in their jobs, it’s more important than ever that they not only learn more about the emerging technology, but have a role in shaping its development, AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler said in prepared remarks the day of the announcement.
“It’s not good for workers to live in fear, to worry about their economic future,” she said. “That’s not good for companies, our economy, or our country as a whole either. It hurts all of us to live in fear and uncertainty.”
Avoiding a New Digital Divide
The Microsoft and AFL-CIO partnership may be one of the largest workforce-based efforts to boost AI literacy, but it’s not the first.
Employer Efforts: In an interview last year with CNBC, IBM CEO Arvind Krishna said the company is “massively upskilling” its nearly 300K employees on AI, adding that he expects the technology to replace about 8K jobs.
In July, PricewaterhouseCoopers announced mandatory training in generative AI for all of its 46K U.S. employees. Such training is a crucial first step in demystifying the technology, according to the company. “The sooner we can get out and start to teach people about this technology, the sooner we can dispel some of that,” Yolanda Seals-Coffield, PwC’s chief U.S. people officer, told Fortune.
It will take all those efforts and more to meet this moment, Armstrong says. While the Microsoft and AFL-CIO partnership could boost millions of workers’ knowledge of AI, the 12.5M union members potentially impacted represent only a fraction of those who need these skills, he says.
“You want to have unions driving this, but also nonunion employers that buy into the importance of having employees trained up and understanding the importance of these technologies for their work,” Armstrong says.
Equity: AI literacy will be nonnegotiable in the workplace of the future, Swartsel says, and companies obviously will play an integral role in helping workers integrate these technologies into their jobs. Not doing so risks creating “a new digital divide where people who do not have access to that training are left further and further behind,” she says.
Not every company is an IBM or PWC, and smaller companies with fewer resources will still need to provide that training, she says.
The first step, according to Swartsel, is giving workers the freedom to experiment with AI—whether they’re industry-specific tools like robots or generative AI apps like ChatGPT—even if it’s in 30-minute bursts. Employers should see it not as a drain on productivity but an essential part of the workday, since “there’s no substitute for just seeing how it works,” Swartsel says.
Companies can also lean on the many AI upskilling platforms on the market, some of which are available at low to no cost. For example, Amazon in November launched AI Ready, an initiative to provide free AI training—including courses in gen AI—to 2M people worldwide by 2025. Swartsel says JFF will spend much of 2024 making sure that these training opportunities are “designed in a way that it can meaningfully reach everybody, so everybody gets the benefits of it.”
For many companies, boosting AI literacy may not be as time- and resource-intensive as they imagine, Armstrong says, since not every worker needs to have a deep knowledge of how AI works.
“The larger share of workers want to know how the technology should look when it’s performing well—what good practice or good performance looks like,” he says. “They don’t really care that much about next token prediction and how the algorithm works for how the foundational models were built.”