What happens when the skills that made someone successful five years ago are no longer enough to do their job tomorrow?

As artificial intelligence transforms industries, employers face a challenge that traditional workforce development was never designed to solve. Jobs are changing faster than companies can rewrite their descriptions, and entirely new roles are emerging without established pathways to prepare for them.

This is the great reskilling: the growing need to equip employees with new capabilities as technology transforms existing jobs and creates new ones. Unlike traditional workforce training, reskilling increasingly means preparing people for changes no one can fully predict.

For business leaders, the question is no longer simply what skills to teach. It is how to build a workforce capable of adapting as the future of working life takes shape.

Harry Walker Agency's exclusive speakers offer perspectives on the technologies, leadership decisions, and human behaviors shaping employment in the future.

How Will AI Redefine What Makes an Employee Valuable?

As AI takes on increasingly sophisticated tasks, the distinction between what technology can do and what people do best is shifting.

AI entrepreneur MATT SHUMER, former CEO of OthersideAI and creator of the HyperWrite AI assistant, offers a firsthand look at the speed of technological change and its implications for the workforce. His perspective challenges leaders to think beyond today's applications and consider how rapidly advancing AI capabilities could reshape entire professions.

Evernote co-founder and former CEO PHIL LIBIN pushes that conversation further. Rather than simply using AI to make existing processes more efficient, he encourages organizations to reconsider how work is structured in the first place.

For ServiceNow Chairman and CEO BILL MCDERMOTT, this transformation presents a leadership imperative: building organizations that can adapt as technology changes the way business gets done.

The opportunity is substantial, but so is the challenge. Companies must prepare employees for a future in which the value of human work may look fundamentally different.

Are We Hiring for Jobs Instead of Capabilities?

Most organizations still organize talent around defined roles, credentials, and experience. But what happens when those categories no longer reflect the work that needs to be done?

Leadership expert and Buckingham Institute founder MARCUS BUCKINGHAM has spent decades challenging conventional approaches to talent management. His research on individual strengths and employee performance offers a different way to think about workforce development: identify what people do exceptionally well, then create opportunities to apply those strengths in new contexts.

Former IBM Chairman and CEO GINNI ROMETTY has similarly championed skills-first approaches to hiring and advancement. Her work demonstrates how organizations can expand access to opportunity by recognizing capabilities that traditional credentials may overlook.

Together, their perspectives raise an important question for employers: How much talent is already inside the organization, waiting for an opportunity to do something different?

What Is the Future of NATO and Transatlantic Security?

Technological transformation is an organizational challenge. New tools can be introduced quickly, but preparing people to use them effectively requires sustained leadership.

Former PepsiCo Chairman and CEO INDRA NOOYI understands what it takes to guide a global organization through change while balancing immediate business demands with long-term investment in people.

Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence Policy Fellow and former senior White House official ROHINI KOSOGLU brings another perspective on the future of work. Drawing on her experience shaping economic and technology policy, she examines how leaders can navigate AI-driven job displacement, workforce training, and the need to ensure that technological progress creates opportunities for more people.

Their perspectives underscore a central tension facing today's executives: companies cannot afford to stop operating while they prepare for the future, but they cannot afford to postpone that preparation either.

Can Workplace Culture Become a Competitive Advantage?

Reskilling depends on more than access to training. Employees need environments where asking questions, receiving feedback, and experimenting with innovative approaches are encouraged.

Bestselling author KIM SCOTT offers a framework for becoming a better boss through Radical Candor, helping leaders deliver direct feedback while demonstrating genuine care. Her approach shows how effective management can create the conditions employees need to learn, improve, and take on new challenges.

Harvard Business School professor LESLIE JOHN, author of Revealing: The Underrated Power of Oversharing, explores another essential ingredient: communication. Her research on curiosity, transparency, and self-disclosure reveals how stronger exchanges of information can improve relationships and collaboration.

Bestselling author and workplace strategist ERICA KESWIN brings the conversation to organizational culture, examining how human connection and intentional workplace practices help employees feel engaged and supported.

Their insights suggest that a company's capacity to learn may depend as much on how people interact as on the technology available to them.

How Do You Build Careers Without Predictable Career Ladders?

For generations, professional advancement followed a relatively familiar trajectory: develop expertise, earn promotions, and move steadily upward.

That model is becoming less reliable as industries evolve and career paths become less linear.

Bestselling author and NYU Stern professor SUZY WELCH helps individuals navigate consequential career decisions by identifying their values, priorities, and long-term goals. Her approach offers a useful framework for workers facing opportunities that may not fit traditional definitions of advancement.

For employers, the implications are significant. Retaining and developing talent may require more flexible career pathways, opportunities for internal mobility, and a willingness to recognize ambitions that extend beyond the next promotion.

Why Must Workforce Training Focus on Unlearning, Too?

Even when organizations identify the skills their employees need, changing established behaviors can be difficult.

Bestselling author and journalist CHARLES DUHIGG explores the science of habits, productivity, and communication, helping leaders understand how people develop new ways of working.

Science journalist and bestselling author DAVID MCRANEY examines the psychology of belief and what makes people reconsider deeply held assumptions.

Their work illuminates a challenge that conventional workforce training programs can overlook: Employees are not simply acquiring new knowledge. They may also need to abandon practices and assumptions that once made them successful.

Successful reskilling requires understanding how people change, not just what they need to learn.

What Does a Future-Ready Workforce Actually Look Like?

The most effective reskilling strategy may be one that never ends.

Rather than preparing employees for a predetermined set of future jobs, organizations can build systems that make adaptation part of everyday work. Skills-based hiring, mentorship, internal mobility, and opportunities to take on unfamiliar challenges all contribute to a workforce capable of evolving alongside the business.

The companies best positioned for the future won't necessarily be those that predict every technological breakthrough or emerging profession.

They'll be the ones that give their people the confidence, capabilities, and opportunities to keep moving forward, whatever comes next.

Continue the Conversation

Preparing for the future of work starts with asking better questions about the skills, people, and capabilities organizations will need next. Harry Walker Agency's exclusive speakers help leaders navigate technological change, rethink talent development, and build workforces ready for what's ahead.

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