AI Is Getting Smarter Every Day. Is Your Workforce?

David Blake

Wednesday, February 11th, 2026

AI is changing work. As a result, adaptability has become non-negotiable. Your business will only make it as far as the speed and agility of your workforce.

AI alone is not an advantage; it is already democratized and as readily accessible to your competitors as it is to you. So, the differentiator becomes your people. This year more than ever, we need to be investing in human development as much or more than we invest in technology.

As leaders, we need to not only make each human more productive, but also ensure each one is smarter and better skilled than yesterday. That is what’s going to be the prerequisite for organizational health and growth in the AI era.

The Learning Landscape in 2026

So, it all starts and ends with people. That was true last year, and the year prior. What has changed are the tools we have at our disposal to enable our people. Let’s take a look at how that is evolving:

The importance of skills is growing. The rate of innovation means skills are changing faster than ever. The half-life of skills is shrinking dramatically, especially for AI skills. We’re starting to see organizations thrive as they enable and lean into skill-based adaptability. Having a clearer picture of your workforce skills illuminates where employees can upskill, adjust, and grow quickly and in all the right ways for the business.
AI can power personalized learning experiences that were never scalable in the past. Employees can now practice and apply new learnings on demand in a low-risk environment. AI coaching empowers and enables every employee to learn at the time that is right for them and receive personalized, timely feedback to help them cement knowledge and upskill more effectively. Plus, AI is continually improving its ability to incorporate and retain individual learning context, which means the feedback it provides is also getting better and better.
AI just opened a huge frontier of skill, learning, and content data. AI provides the ability to evaluate a large body of learning experiences. You can now look at all learning content, articles, courses, podcasts, classes, and degrees collectively, and collect the data to see which content and pathways are actually creating the skill-based outcomes your organization is looking for. This is an entirely new set of data than what has been available in the past. It makes it easier to deploy impactful skill development at scale.

AI raises expectations. It doesn’t remove work.

AI won’t replace workers.

Here’s why. We can either take the efficiency AI offers and enable each individual to do more work with the same hours in the work week, or we can use it to do the exact same amount of work in fewer hours. The smart decision is to take the efficiency gains. Grow output with the same number of people instead of slowing output and reducing the number of people.

There will always be a competitive advantage to the human working the additional hour.

Even as AI gets more sophisticated, it’s not eliminating work at scale. According to Forbes, leaders use AI more than managers, and managers use AI more than individual contributors. Think about that: AI use is being modeled at the top levels and progressively on down. Yet, you likely aren’t seeing leaders suddenly inundated with free time because they are using AI most. AI isn’t replacing their work. It’s raising the bar for efficiency, effectiveness, and output.

We won’t suddenly work fewer hours because AI is smarter. Employers will expect more impact from the same time investment. That’s good news for the employment market.

According to the McKinsey State of AI report from 2025, 80% of respondents said their company made efficiency an AI objective, “but the companies seeing the most value from AI often set growth or innovation as additional objectives.” These factors are where the real value of an AI-powered future lies. We don’t just do more of what we do now faster. We find new ways of working, of developing, of innovating to grow the business.

And AI can’t do this by itself. Future-ready workforce solutions need human growth and creativity in order for AI transformation to work successfully at scale. Full stop.

The future belongs to better learners

In an AI-powered world, the most important skill isn’t knowing everything. It’s knowing how to learn what’s next. The future of work won’t be defined by how intelligent our machines become. It will be defined by how intentionally we invest in human capability.

The companies that win in the next era of work won’t be the ones with the most advanced AI. They’ll be the ones that have cracked the code of personalized learning at scale. The ones that build the most agile, capable, and continuously learning workforce.

So, I ask again: With AI getting smarter every day… are your employees getting smarter too?

Because they should be.