Understanding the AI Skills for Business Framework — leaders guide and personas (part 1)

As artificial intelligence continues to reshape the business landscape, organisations face a critical challenge: ensuring their workforce has the right skills to leverage AI effectively. The AI Skills for Business Framework, developed through extensive collaboration between the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology and industry partners, provides a comprehensive roadmap for business leaders to understand and develop AI capabilities across their organizations.

The framework arrives at a crucial moment when businesses of all sizes are grappling with AI integration. It's not just about having technical experts – it's about building organisation-wide competency to ensure AI initiatives deliver real business value. The framework identifies four key personas that organisations need to develop: AI Citizens, AI Workers, AI Professionals, and AI Leaders.

These are your customers and general workforce who interact with AI in their daily lives. Think of a retail customer using an AI-powered shopping assistant, or an office worker using AI-enhanced productivity tools. They need to understand AI's basic capabilities and limitations to engage with it effectively and safely.

These employees don't directly develop AI systems but use them in their roles. Consider a marketing manager using AI tools for campaign optimisation, a healthcare worker using AI-assisted diagnostic tools, or a financial analyst using AI for market trend analysis. They need deeper knowledge about AI's capabilities and limitations within their domain, along with the ability to critically evaluate AI outputs.

These are your technical specialists who design, develop, and maintain AI systems. Examples include data scientists building predictive maintenance models in manufacturing, AI engineers developing natural language processing systems for customer service, or machine learning specialists optimising supply chain operations. They require deep technical expertise combined with strong ethical awareness and business acumen.

These individuals, often in C-suite or senior management positions, guide the organisation's AI strategy and governance. They need to understand AI's strategic implications, manage risks, and drive organisational change. For instance, a retail CEO needs to understand how AI can transform the customer experience while managing privacy concerns, or a manufacturing COO needs to balance automation opportunities with workforce impact.

The framework's flexibility makes it applicable across sectors. In healthcare, AI Citizens might be patients using AI-powered health apps, AI Workers could be nurses using AI-assisted diagnostic tools, AI Professionals would be the teams developing these tools, and AI Leaders would be hospital administrators developing AI adoption strategies.

In financial services, this might translate to customers using AI-powered banking apps (Citizens), financial advisors using AI for portfolio management (Workers), teams developing fraud detection systems (Professionals), and executives overseeing AI-driven digital transformation (Leaders).

Understanding these personas is crucial for developing effective AI capabilities in your organisation. Each role requires different levels of AI competency, and organisations need to ensure they're developing the right skills at each level.

In our next post, we'll dive deeper into the five dimensions of AI competency that these personas need to master: Privacy and Stewardship, Technical Infrastructure, Problem Definition and Communication, Problem Solving and Analysis, and Evaluation and Reflection.

For business leaders, the key takeaway is clear: successful AI adoption requires a holistic approach to skills development across all levels of your organisation. It's not enough to just hire AI experts – you need to build AI literacy and competency throughout your workforce.

Building these capabilities may seem daunting, but the framework provides a clear path forward. Start by identifying where these personas exist in your organisation and assess their current capabilities against the framework. This will help you develop targeted training and development programs to build the AI skills your organisation needs for the future.