We expect 2025 will be the year in which human-centered AI will have to earn its moniker. Amid the still-significant excitement around the potential of gen AI and other AI technologies, it’s worth reminding ourselves of two critical insights about technology. One is that it’s never just tech when it comes to getting value from tech. Many organizational and operational changes are needed. And two, any tech or AI transformation is really a people transformation. CIOs in 2025 will need to ingest those truths if they want to get past both the early-stage excitement and practical frustrations of implementing gen AI in the past year or two.

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In light of the challenges, there are three things for CIOs to consider. The first will be to acknowledge and address the deeply unsettling nature of gen AI and how it might affect tech people’s jobs. While we are still in the early days and experiments with gen AI showing promising results in helping people do their jobs better, how jobs will change and what skills will be valued are creating an undercurrent of resistance that could make harnessing gen AI’s potential difficult. Tech leaders will need to overinvest in clear and consistent communication about changes and opportunities.

This leads to the second area of focus, which is the need to double down on building skills. Effective skill building will not only help people perform better but also enable them to adapt and grow. We know from our research that one of the primary motivators of top talent is the desire to grow their skills so that they remain relevant and in demand.¹ Gen AI has an important role in improving how people learn by better tailoring skill building to the individual and learning what prompts, support, and learning formats work best. This is truly terra incognita and will require significant focus from CIOs.

That leads us to the third item, which is to focus these learning efforts at a domain level. Our rewired work on digital and AI transformations demonstrates that change is effective only when it is applied at a scale large enough to matter yet discrete enough to be practical. In this case, CIOs will need to work with their peers in HR to understand the end-to-end implications of developing learning journeys in this gen AI world, including identifying needed skills, creating bespoke learning programs, measuring their effectiveness, and adapting as the technology changes.

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