What PwC just bet on

This week Morning Brew ran a short item: PwC is putting more than 85,000 of its people through a new Critical Thinking & Judgment Certificate. The program starts in December, with more than $100 million behind it. The reason is that AI now does much of the foundational work that used to teach junior staff how to think. (Business Insider)

I started forwarding it to clients. Then I stopped, because I had more to say than one-off comments in text.

Why it caught my attention

I work with CEOs and founders, as well as with freelancers and filmmakers. That gives me a view of how AI is changing work at every size of company and every kind of leadership.

PwC deserves credit for responding to AI by creating opportunity. Some people inside the firm would probably say the response was too slow or too thin. And in the creative and industrial arts there's a fair argument that AI is taking over too much of the craft itself. I have separate opinions about that. I'll make that argument elsewhere.

The real provocation

What matters to me is the question this raises for every leader: is the company doing enough with the openings AI is creating?

A competitive edge can still come from the product, or from how it's delivered. More and more, it also comes from how the people inside the company think, about AI and about their work in general.

Working alongside AI has changed how a lot of people approach problems. It rewards curiosity and asking better questions. It assumes a solution exists, and that the job is to refine it with colleagues and with the technology, instead of doubting whether there's a solution at all.

What it's done to my own thinking

This is how AI has changed the way I solve problems and make decisions. I'm more adaptable and more flexible, and somewhat more willing to take risks. I've come to accept that very few things are permanent. That might sound like the wheels coming off, existentially (perhaps they are?). But here and now? In practice? It's freeing. It shows how much room there is to experiment and test, far more than I used to notice.

Putting money behind it

There's a national conversation about the shortage of critical thinking in the workforce, starting with how little of it colleges develop. PwC's answer amounts to: we need more critical thinkers, AI has given us the time to build them, so let's build them and own that ground. I imagine that will be good for its people, its clients, and the firm. And AI's effect on its workforce is what made it possible. It also raises an interesting question about how employers are now subsiding that which could or should have been developed in higher ed.

The question worth sitting with

The doom-and-gloom side of the AI scorecard has an endless checklist ticked off. This is one example of the other side: a creative, opportunistic response to the room AI is opening up for people to become more adaptable and more capable. The alternative is to stay reactive, intimidated, stalled, or in denial.

For any leader, of an operation of any size, the question is where AI is opening room for them and their people to think better, and what they're doing with it.