‘Give me three years, I’ll have hopefully enough AI savvy people’: Palo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Arora says it’s up to workers to adapt to AI – and that includes leadership

Palo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Arora has issued a stark warning to workers reluctant to adapt to generative AI: they face a “Darwinian moment”.

Speaking during a recent appearance on the 20VC podcast, Arora suggested a significant portion of workers globally lack necessary AI skills, which raises questions about how leaders can implement change and build workforces capable of meeting future demands.

“The challenge right now is 90% of enterprise employees are not AI savvy. They’re not,” he said.

“They have to learn. I can’t send them to university. There’s no course you can take in school anywhere. They have to be able to learn on their own. I think we’re back to a Darwinian moment where everybody has to figure out who’s really good.”

In some cases, building an AI savvy workforce has prompted some drastic action by executives. Nikesh pointed to Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong’s approach of penalizing workers who refused to adapt or embrace the technology.

During a podcast appearance last year, Armstrong admitted to firing workers who refused to engage with the technology after paying for enterprise licenses for GitHub Copilot and Cursor.

Other organizations, such as Jack Dorsey’s Block, reportedly introduced AI mandates for workers. Both companies laid off staff this year amidst claims that the technology is changing how they operate.

“You’ve seen people like Brian Armstrong and Jack Dorsey go out and say, ‘I’m going to decimate my organization, and I’m going to start building from scratch’ and they’ve gone to some version of 30, 40% fewer people because they figured out there is no redemption,” Arora said.

As ITPro reported last year, punitive measures to spur AI adoption in the enterprise is a sure fire way to create workforce pushback.

It’s a similar dynamic to the return to office (RTO) mandates that caused widespread upheaval at a range of big tech firms in recent years. Encourage, but don’t push, or else it could come back to bite you.

Palo Alto Networks’ approach leans toward a gradual shift, Arora noted. The company, which has roughly 20,000 staff, has a “natural attrition of 2% a month. The focus now is on replacing these staff with people who are indeed AI-savvy.

Elsewhere, the company actively seeks out AI talent from events such as hackathons, Arora revealed. These are lucrative talent pools that the company can draw from to acquire staff.

“We hire from hackathons,” he said. “Give me 12 months, I’ll have sort of transformed 20, 25% of my team. Give me three years, I’ll hopefully have enough AI-savvy people working at Palo Alto.”

Top-down encouragement

Building an AI-savvy workforce also requires accountability on the part of leadership, Arora said. Delivering change requires leaders across an array of functions to have ambition and actively engage with the technology.

Arora has regular conversations with leadership figures aimed at establishing their progress with AI, allowing them to showcase potential wins.

“You have to make sure your leaders are ambitious. You have to make sure they're competitive. You have to make sure they want to win. You have to make sure that they have a learning mindset,” he said.

“When they watch their peers around them do cool [stuff], they want to show up and do cool [stuff] the next time. So for me, it's getting 14 people together and saying, ‘Hey, Harry, tell me today, what have you done for AI the last three days since I last talked to you in your organization, and whatever motivates you?”

This gives Arora a clear understanding of the direction some leaders are going in with the technology. Moreover, it appears to act as a springboard for motivating others across the company.

“It creates a little bit of Darwinian competition amongst them. It creates this urge to go embrace this new technology, and I think hopefully I get 14 people fully motivated, and then they go do that with the next set of people because I need to transform from the top down, not from the bottom up on this topic.”

FOLLOW US ON SOCIAL MEDIA

Follow ITPro on Google News and add us as a preferred source to keep tabs on all our latest news, analysis, views, and reviews.

You can also follow ITPro on LinkedIn, X, Facebook, and BlueSky.