The first edition of StrAIght to business was held at the Venice School of Management of Ca' Foscari University Venice. The choice of location was in line with the goals of the initiative, to trigger a generative process that could connect young university talent, companies and experts in artificial intelligence and facilitate entry into the field of generative AI through specific applications.
The links between work, skills and AI were the topics most investigated by all the StrAIght to business interventions.
According to a recent survey by IBM Augmented work for an automated, AI-driven world., AI will not replace people, but people who use AI will replace those who do not.
AI is very rapidly changing traditional business models and transforming work. Many of the activities people do today will not be needed in tomorrow's businesses.
Human-machine partnerships are increasing worker productivity and delivering exponential business value.
There is a technological convergence leading to a new and full awareness, as James Lovelock says in his Novacene: The Age of Hyperintelligence., a book quoted by Antonio Marcomini, pro-rector of Ca' Foscari with responsibility for Land Relations, who brought greetings from the Rector to StrAIght to business. The underlying thesis of this text is that the living system will somehow regulate itself.
If the business world is to build new skills in its human resources, the University must accompany students on a path of new awareness, made up of soft skills and hard skills, and it must do so through new training models that are problem based and challenge based. The University must become a great training ground for the future, said Michele Bugliesi in his speech at StrAIght to business.
Also according to IBM's research, 40 percent of the workforce will need to retrain in the next three years for the implementation of AI and automation. This means that about 1.4 billion people out of 3.4 billion in the global workforce will need to acquire new skills, according to World Bank statistics. This study shows that technical skills are now considered a basic requirement, while the focus has shifted to the development of human skills, the so-called soft-skills.
The need to adapt and acquire new skills is a constant in the modern job market. Companies and employees must be proactive in identifying and developing emerging skills to remain competitive and thrive in an ever-changing environment.
However, innovation must be pursued in a disciplined and collaborative way, through a broader, heterogeneous and interactive system of relationships.
The university needs to have students quickly test their acquired skills, said Anna Comacchio, director of the Venice School of Management. Synergy with the world of work must begin as early as the formative years of the university and can be achieved through innovative formats such as StrAIght to business that allows students to tackle this major technological transformation in an active way. Students grapple with real challenges and create a new value proposition for participating companies. In addition to the prototypes that are created, what emerges is a new capacity for dialogue between business, academia and the world of technology, an ecosystem from which everyone can benefit.
Cultivating this ecosystem is critical for the university to prepare students for jobs that do not yet exist.