AI has redefined the talent game. Here’s how leaders are responding.
Presented by Indeed
As AI continues to reshape the way we work, organizations are rethinking what skills they need, how they hire and how they retain talent. According to Indeed’s 2025 Tech Talent ReportTech job openings are still down more than 30% from pre-pandemic peaks, but demand for AI expertise has never been higher. New roles are emerging almost overnight, from fast-paced engineers to AI operations managers, and leaders are under increasing pressure to close skills 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, came together for a recent roundtable discussion about the future of tech talent strategy, from hiring and reskilling to how it’s reshaping the workforce.
Strategies for finding talent
To find the right candidates, organizations need to be sure their communications are clear from the start, and that means starting with a well-thought-out job description, Hardeman said.
“How clearly do you outline the skills actually required for the position, rather than using very lofty or ambiguous language,” she said. “Something I also highly recommend is looking for skills from skill clusters. We use that to identify candidates who may border on these harder-to-find niche skills. That’s something we can upskill people in. Skills that are in distributed computing systems or machine learning frameworks, for example, also share other high-value capabilities. Using these clusters can help recruiters identify candidates who may not have the exact skills you’re looking for, but can develop into them quickly.”
Recruiters also need further training so that they can recognize that potential in candidates. And once hired, companies must be intentional about how they grow talent from the day they walk in the door.
“What that means in the short term is that we need to focus on mentorship, and we need to embed AI fluidity into their onboarding experience, into their growth and into their development,” she said. “That means offering upskilling that teaches not only the tools they need, but how to think with those tools and beyond them. The new sweet spot in early career is where technical skills meet our human strengths. Curiosity. Communication. Data judgment. Workflow design. Those are the things AI can’t replicate or replace. We need to create opportunities for mentorship and sponsorship. Wellbeing and culture are critical components to ensuring we create sweet spots for that young talent to land.”
How work will evolve with AI
As AI becomes embedded in everyday technical work, organizations are rethinking what it means to be a developer, designer or engineer. Instead of automating roles from end to end, companies are increasingly building AI agents that act as teammates and support employees throughout the software development lifecycle.
Candy explained that IBM is already seeing this shift in action through its Consulting Advantage platform, which serves as a unified AI experience layer for consultants and engineering teams.
“This is a platform that all our consultants work with,” he said. “It’s backed by every piece of AI technology and model out there. It’s where our consultants have access to thousands of agents to help them with every function and activity they perform.”
These aren’t just off-the-shelf tools: teams can create their own agents and publish them to an internal marketplace. That has led to a systematic effort to map every task into traditional engineering roles and build agents to improve them.
“When I think about your traditional designer, DevOps engineer, AI Ops engineer – what are all the different agents that support them in those activities?” said Candy. “It’s much more than just coding. Tools like Cursor, Windsurf and GitHub Copilot speed up coding, but that’s just part of delivering software end-to-end. We’re building agents to support people at every stage of that journey.”
Candy said this shift is leading to a workplace where AI becomes a collaborator rather than a replacement, something that allows tech workers to spend more time on creative, strategic and people-focused tasks.
“This future where employees have agents alongside them to take care of some of these repetitive activities and focus on higher-value, strategic work where people skills are inherently important, I think is going to be at the heart of that,” he explains. “You have to let go of the organization to be able to think and reconsider in that way.”
Much of that depends on the mindset of business leaders, Ahuja said.
“I see the difference between leaders who view AI as cost savings, reduction – it is an activity that comes down to the bottom line,” she said. “And then there are organizations that are starting to change their mindset by saying, no, the goal isn’t about replacing people. It’s about reimagining work to make us humans more human, ironically. For some leaders, that’s the story their PR teams have told them. But for those who actually believe AI is helping us become more human, it’s interesting how they bring that to life and bridge the gap between humanity and digital work.”
Shifting the culture to AI
The companies that are most successful at overcoming the obstacles around successful AI implementation and culture change are making employees their first priority, Ahuja added. They prioritize use cases that solve the most boring problems that plague their teams, and show how AI will help, rather than looking at what can replace the maximum number of jobs automation.
“They see it as preserving human responsibility so that in high-stakes moments, people will still make the final decision,” she said. “Looking at where AI is going to excel at scale and speed with pattern recognition, leaving room for people to bring their judgment, their ethics and their emotional intelligence to the table. It seems like a very subtle shift, but it’s quite big in terms of where it starts at the beginning of an organization and how it trickles down.”
It is also important to create a level of comfort in using AI in employees’ daily work. Salesforce created a Slack chat called Bite-Sized AI, where they encourage every colleague, including business leaders, to talk about where they’re using AI and why, and what hacks they’ve found.
“That’s creating a safe space,” Ahuja explained. “It creates that psychological safety — that this isn’t just a buzzword. We try to encourage it through behavior.”
“This is all about how, especially in large corporations, you ignite the kind of passion and fire in everyone’s belly,” Candy added. “Telling stories, showing examples of what great looks like. The phrase is ‘demos, not memos’. Stop writing PowerPoint slides explaining what we’re going to do and dig into the tools to show it in real life.”
AI makes that continuous learning a non-negotiable option, Hardeman added, with companies training their employees to use the AI tools made available to them, going a long way toward building that AI culture.
“We view upskilling as a retention lever and a performance enhancer,” she said. “It creates that trust, it reduces the fear around AI adoption. It helps people see a future for themselves as technology evolves. AI hasn’t just raised the bar in terms of skills. It’s raised the bar in the way we try to support our people. It’s important that we rise to the occasion as well, and we’re not just raising the expectations of the people we work with.”
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