Generative AI once again took centre stage in the world of technology in 2024. Everywhere you turned, someone was talking about it and trying to understand the implications for their business. While we can expect more of the same in 2025, the conversation is evolving as many GenAI proof-of-concepts will move into production, or as more organisations experiment with GenAI.

Maureen Lonergan, vice president of Amazon Web Services’ Training and Certification

In fact, two out of three organisations said that they are increasing their investments in GenAI due to early signs of business value, according to a Deloitte study. The greater investment in GenAI means businesses will need more people with AI skills to execute their AI strategies and roadmap, which in turn requires leaders to continue providing AI skills training for their employees in 2025.

We saw significant demand in 2024 from AWS’s customers and partners who want to help their employees gain AI fluency, which enabled us to train two million people globally with free AI skills in just one year as part of Amazon’s AI Ready commitment. The demand for AI skills training will continue to rise.

In Vietnam, the government has issued a national strategy on AI research, development, and application by 2030, with the goal of making the country a centre for innovation and development of AI solutions and applications globally. At the same time, many Vietnamese businesses have quickly seized the opportunities offered by AI, and boosted their investments to master the new technology.

For example, Vietnam International Bank is the first bank in Vietnam to integrate ViePro, a virtual asisstant powered by AWS’ GenAI solutions, into its digital banking app MyVIB. It has also collaborated with AWS to implement a comprehensive cloud and GenAI training programme for its 12,000-person workforce through AWS Skill Builder.

Change brings uncertainty

There are five other skills trends you can expect to impact you and your employee talent strategy this year.

The first is that GenAI skills remain critical but do not neglect soft skills. As more companies adopt GenAI in their business to drive innovations and improve workflows, there is no doubt that leaders will spend more time understanding GenAI fundamentals. However, they will also refresh their soft skills like effective communication, decision-making, manager coaching, and change management.

With change comes uncertainty, and there’s a lot of pressure for leaders to help their workforce prepare for and understand the organisation’s point of view on the GenAI evolution. Employees need clear guidance and encouragement to be part of the change – including the psychological safety to try new things and fail safely.

Now is the time to examine your culture to ensure it supports ongoing learning, critical thinking, and experimentation at all levels of the organisation. GenAI is going to do more for us than we ever imagined, and in order to accelerate your opportunities with GenAI, it is important to equip your organisation with both soft and hard skills.

Secondly, GenAI-powered learning is on the rise. Technology advancements have continually lowered barriers to help more people access quality education. Such learning will open even more opportunities to level the education playing field.

Not everyone can have a dedicated, in-person tutor, but with GenAI, more people can have this type of experience embedded in a digital learning system. Research shows that one-on-one tutoring vastly improves student performance. A GenAI-powered tutor assists you as you learn, understanding your current knowledge and skill level, where you need additional support, and providing recommendations and coaching along your personalised learning path.

The third aspect is that digital learning assistants accelerate business outcomes. It is not just students who will benefit from AI tutors or learning assistants, employees who are upskilling and reskilling will too. For leaders, this means your investment in digital training modalities for your employees will generate an even greater return on investment.

Your employees can gain enhanced learning depth through digital training, allowing you to quickly develop a workforce that has the critical skillsets to contribute to business growth. Simply put, the faster and better your workforce can learn new concepts and skills through the power of GenAI, the faster they will be able to help your business innovate and improve the bottom line.

AWS is committed to helping. In Vietnam, we have strengthened the developer community through an AWS Study Group. AWS provides targeted support and resources to group leaders of the AWS Study Group, and helps enable peer-to-peer discussions, at scale, between developers and community leaders.

The Vietnam AWS Study Group offers over 170 workshops to help community members gain hands-on experiences. Over 460 AWS blogs have also been translated into Vietnamese to help keep the group updated on the latest technology and trends – such as GenAI, data, security, and application development.

Upskilling the workforce

Next up, cohort-style training drives long-term business impact. One of the best ways to keep up with the pace of technology is to invest in organisation-wide upskilling initiatives that build an engaged culture of learning. However, it can be tough to know how and where to invest to maximise your organisation’s immediate innovation need.

With the interest in GenAI, in particular, we are seeing more organisations deploy short-term, highly focused training initiatives on a specific topic, area, or team. The key is to organise a collaborative, cohort-style training that includes dedicated ideation, hands-on learning, and soft skills education.

These sessions have a few key benefits. Firstly, employees come away with actionable use cases that maximise the newly developed skills, giving them priority focus areas that might not have been possible without collaborative, hands-on learning. Secondly, with priority initiatives identified, leaders can make quick decisions about redeploying newly skilled talent into new roles or investing in additional reskilling. Thirdly, the short-term and focused nature of the training gives the organisation quicker results, which reinforces the business benefit of skills development. This leads to greater leadership buy-in for workforce skills initiatives.

Given the success we have seen in cohort-style GenAI training, I expect more leaders will adopt this approach as they continue to upskill their workforce in 2025 and beyond. And given how quickly GenAI is evolving, speed matters more than ever in the world of technology and business.

Finally, measuring business impact from training efforts. As we help our customers and partners launch GenAI training, we are also helping them determine how to measure the value of training efforts. Productivity is an important factor to evaluate, but it is much more than that, and it is a long game. By ensuring your team has the right skills to complete a project or initiative, you do not have to recruit new talent, outsource the work, or worse, shelve the venture altogether.

Measuring the business impact of ongoing training comes down to what can be accomplished that was not possible without skills development. This takes into account your teams’ engagement, retention, efficiency, collaboration, and confidence to take risks.

None of us can know exactly what 2025 will bring given how quickly AI and its impact on your business and people are evolving. The only thing a leader can control is the environment they create that allows their workforce to take on new challenges and opportunities with confidence. What’s certain is that investing in your employees empowers them to build skills that will be paramount to your success in 2025, no matter where your roadmap is leading you.