Virtual attendees at the Charter Workplace Summit on Oct. 8 will have the chance to see our conversation with Sal Khan, CEO and founder of Khan Academy. (You can register to join the summit here, and virtual attendance is free.)
Khan’s online education nonprofit has been a powerful platform for people of all ages to gain knowledge and learn skills, giving him a unique vantage on how education, training, and work will evolve with the further application of AI. Khan Academy has been piloting an AI tutor and teaching assistant called Khanmigo, and Khan recently published Brave New Words: How AI Will Revolutionize Education (and Why That’s a Good Thing), an optimistic take on how to prepare students for the workforce of tomorrow.
As a preview of the upcoming Summit interview, here are Khan’s views on two critical questions, edited for space and clarity:
What are the enduring human work skills in a world with ever-advancing AI? Some people say students should study liberal arts. Others say deep domain expertise is the key to remaining professionally relevant. Others say you need to have the skills of a manager to be able to delegate to AI. What do you think are the skills or competencies that ensure continued relevance professionally, employability, etc.?
To some degree, everything you just listed is kind of true. I’m a big fan of the liberal arts, and I think that’s going to create a lot of value—but I don’t think that somehow makes you AI proof.
Almost every job has a human-interaction side to it. It has a personal connection, relationships, collaboration, selling aspect to it. And those are things where even the most ambitious optimist around AI doesn’t think AI is going to be able to do them well anytime soon. So people can lean into those things more.
As employers and managers, we’ve always known that a great salesperson, a great manager, a great coach has certain of these human ‘intangibles.’ Ironically, AI is going to be a way that we can start to make these things a little bit more tangible. We’re exploring ways that you could have assessments on things that before you thought were intangible. Now you could have someone give a talk, someone go through a simulation where they’re trying to convince someone or debate someone or manage someone.
It’s really important to give people a curious, entrepreneurial mindset. These are the people who are going to succeed. These are the people you want in your organization who are like, ‘I’m going to try this stuff out.’ What you as a leader want to do is give not only time and permission to explore these tools, but encouragement and pretty significant nudges.
I try to tell the Khan Academy team, ‘Spend a couple hours a week using these tools and share your stories when they worked and when they didn’t work.’
A lot of organizations are thinking about skills-based approaches to their talent. It involves questions like, ‘Does someone know how to do this thing or not?’ And what are the ways in which they can learn it and have some accredited way to know they actually have done it? That is one of the ways in which people use Khan Academy. Do you have a view of skills-based approaches within workplaces, and any thoughts on how AI tutors and training fit within that context?
At a high level, anyone who asks me if I had more resources or if I were the emperor of the world, what would I do? I would create a global or international competency-based system. Some of it would be the stuff that Khan Academy already works on, traditional academic skills. But I would try to map—and I would do this in conjunction with employers—what are the top skills that you really care about? Then I would construct assessments, and this is where AI is powerful.
If you really care about someone’s salesmanship—whatever that means, you could probably break that down into more dimensions—you could probably have someone go through AI simulations now and glean a lot more than you could do currently just looking at someone’s resume and doing five rounds of interviews. You could create a competency base like, ‘Someone has achieved this level of competency when they go through that.’
That simulation today, it would be text-based, but in a year or two, it will feel like this conversation we’re having. You think I’m a real person, but the Sal you’re talking to is an AI. You’ll be the salesman and I’m going to be like the buyer and you have to convince me. There’s going to be some cool stuff there with AI. Historically, there’s been a tension between standardization and consistency at one end and richness at the other end. So you could do narrow things in a very standardized, consistent way—SAT scores, etc., which can be important. Or can you do math? But then there’s all this other stuff that we tried to glean through interviews, through a simulation, through a thesis-defense type of thing. And those things, not only are they inconsistent, they’re very expensive, resource-intensive to administer. AI is going to change that.
Register to join the fourth annual Charter Workplace Summit.
Buy a copy of Khan’s Brave New Words from Bookshop.org or Amazon.