Presented by Really
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 2025 Tech Talent Reporttech job postings are down more than 30 percent from prior highs, yet demand for AI skills has never been higher. From agile engineers to AI operations managers, new roles are emerging overnight, and leaders are under increasing pressure to close the skills gap while helping 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 Hardiman, 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 retention to how it’s changing the workforce.
Strategies for sourcing talent
To find the right candidates, organizations need to make sure their communication is clear from the get-go, Hardiman said, and that means starting with a well-thought-out job description.
"How are you outlining the skills that are actually required for the role, versus using too high-level or vague language?" He said. "Something I also highly recommend is talent cluster sourcing. We use this to identify candidates that may be relevant to those hard-to-find niche skills. This is something we can grow people into. For example, skills that are in distributed computing or machine learning frameworks also share other high-value skills. Using these clusters can help recruiters identify candidates who may not have the exact skill set you’re looking for, but can add up quickly."
Recruiters should also be sophisticated, able to spot this potential in candidates. And once they’re hired, companies have to be intentional about how they’re developing talent from the day they walk in the door.
"It means focusing on guiding them in the near future, and embedding that in their onboarding experience, in their development, in their growth, in their development." He said. "This means offering upskilling that not only teaches them the tools they will need, but how to think with and alongside those tools. The new early career sweet spot is where technical skills meet our human strengths. Curiosity Communication. Data Decision Workflow Design. These are things that AI cannot replicate or replace. We have to create opportunities for teachers and sponsors. Wellbeing and culture are key ingredients to ensure we are creating good places for talent early in their careers."
How will work evolve alongside AI?
As AI becomes embedded in everyday technical tasks, organizations are rethinking what it means to be a developer, designer, or engineer. Rather than automating roles, companies are increasingly building AI agents that act as teammates, supporting workers throughout the software development lifecycle.
Candy explained that IBM is already seeing this shift through its Advisory Advantage platform, which serves as a unified AI experience layer for advisors and technical teams.
“It’s a platform that every one of our advisors works with,” he said. “It’s supported by every piece of AI technology and model out there. It’s where our advisors can access thousands of agents who can help them with every job role and activity they need.”
These aren’t just pre-built tools – teams can create and publish their own agents to the internal marketplace. This has given rise to a systematic effort to build agents to map and augment each task in traditional tech roles.
“If I think about your traditional designer, DevOps engineer, AIOps engineer – what are all the different agents that support them in these activities?” Candy said. “It’s about more than just coding. Tools like Cursor, Windsurf, and GitHub CoPilot make coding faster, but that’s only one part of finishing the software. We’re building agents to help people at every step of that journey.”
Candy said this shift leads to a workplace where AI becomes a collaborative partner rather than a substitute, enabling tech workers to spend more time on creative, strategic and human-centered tasks.
"”This future where agents work with employees, taking care of some of those repetitive activities, focusing on high-value strategic work where human skills are important, I think gets right to the heart of it,” he explained."
A lot of it depends on the mindset of the company’s leaders, Ahuja said.
"He said, “I can see the difference between leaders who see AI as a cost-cutting, downsizing—it’s a grassroots activity.” It’s about reimagining work to make us humans, ironically, more human. For some leaders, that’s the story their PR teams have asked them to tell. But for those who actually believe that AI is about helping us become more human, it’s interesting to see how they’re bringing it to life and bridging the gap between humanity and digital labor."
Shifting Culture to the Ai
Ahuja added that the companies that are most successful in navigating the hurdles around successful AI implementation and culture change make employees their number one priority. They prioritize use cases that solve the most boring problems that are burdening their teams, showing how AI will help, as opposed to seeing how more and more jobs can be replaced by automation.
"They’re thinking of it as preserving human accountability, so in high-stakes moments, people will still make that last call," He said. "Seeing that AI is going to improve at scale and at a faster pace with pattern recognition, leaving room for humans to bring their judgment, their ethics and their emotional intelligence. It seems like a very subtle shift, but it’s huge 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 for employees to use AI in their day-to-day work. Salesforce developed a Slack chat called bite-sized AI in which they encourage every colleague, including company leaders, to share where they’re using and why, and what hacks they’ve found.
"It is creating a safe space," Ahuja explained. "It’s creating psychological safety – that it’s not just a buzzword. We are trying to encourage this through behavior."
"It’s all about how you ignite, especially in large enterprises, the kind of passion and fire inside everyone’s belly." Candy added. "Telling a story, showing examples of what it looks like. The expression is ‘demo, not memo’. Stop writing PowerPoint slides about what we’re going to do and get into the tools to actually demonstrate it in real life.
AI makes this constant learning non-negotiable, Hardiman added, with companies training employees to understand how to use the AI ​​tools they provide, and that goes a long way in building an AI culture.
"We see upscaling as a retention lever and performance driver," He said. "This builds trust, reducing the fear surrounding AI adoption. It helps people see the future for themselves as technology evolves. AI didn’t just lift the ban on skills. It raised the bar that we are trying to help our people. It’s important that we’re also rising to the occasion, and that we’re not just expecting the people we work with."
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