To employers, AI skills aren't just for tech majors anymore
By the time Christian Vivas enrolled in a new artificial intelligence program at Miami Dade College, he had already experimented with using ChatGPT to help him write emails to clients of the creative media studio he owns.
Vivas said most of his classmates were like him - adults well into their careers looking to learn how to use AI, or use it better. Thanks to his classes, Vivas, who is 37 and has a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering, has gone way beyond using ChatGPT. He now employs AI in nearly every aspect of his work: generating images, videos, marketing plans, social media captions. "It's integrated very deeply into our business now," Vivas said.
Generative AI technology is rapidly changing the labor market. Employers are increasingly posting job listings that include AI skills for positions even outside of the technology sector, such as in health care, hospitality and media.
To keep up, students are increasingly looking for ways to boost their AI skills and make themselves more marketable at a time when there's growing fear that AI will replace humans in the workforce. And their concerns are justified: There's evidence to suggest artificial intelligence may have already replaced some jobs. Entry-level positions are particularly at risk of being replaced by AI, a report from Oxford Economics shows, and the unemployment rate for recent college graduates jumped to nearly 6 percent in March, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
A global survey of more than 1,000 large businesses showed 41 percent expect to reduce their workforces within five years because of AI. But most companies - 77 percent - also plan to train their employees to "better work alongside AI," according to the World Economic Forum's January Future of Jobs report. Last year, the number of online job postings that included generative AI as a desired skill grew 323 percent, from fewer than 16,000 to more than 66,000, according to a report from the labor analytics company Lightcast.
Related: Interested in more news about colleges and universities? Subscribe to our free biweekly higher education newsletter.
Colleges are also motivated by these trends: They're adding AI to their course catalogs, and individual professors are altering lessons to include AI skill building.
Miami Dade College, for example, debuted its artificial intelligence certificate program in 2023, just over a month after ChatGPT was unveiled. The program offers classes in machine learning, ethics and natural language programming, among other courses. Since rolling out the certificate program, the school has added associate and bachelor's degree programs in applied AI.
"We started developing this idea around the application of AI - how you can apply AI, how can you learn AI at a community college - where it is open to everyone, not just to a few who can get a master's or Ph.D.," said Antonio Delgado, vice president of innovation and technology partnerships at Miami Dade College.
In 2022, the college also created Miami Tech Works, an organization that helps tech companies find skilled workers. Recently, more businesses outside of tech have reached out to hire people who know how to use AI.
"We didn't know there would be so many employers talking about AI and talking about implementing AI," said Terri-Ann Brown, director of Miami Tech Works.
Brown said the owner of a high-end hotel in South Florida told her that a year ago, the hotel's executives were worried about AI taking their jobs. Now, each department at the hotel has been charged with researching AI tools and reporting ways they can use them. For example, one department created an online chatbot to recommend restaurants to hotel guests.
Miami Dade College's programs have attracted students like Vicky Cheung, who decided to enroll in the college's artificial intelligence awareness certificate program in 2024, after she was let go from the Miami hospital where she had worked for more than two decades.
Cheung, who already had a bachelor's in business and a master's in health management, was looking into courses that would give her skills she could add to her resume.
She believes her AI courses, coupled with her years of work experience, helped her land her new job analyzing how to improve processes and workflow at a different hospital.Enrolling in the program showed employers "that I'm trying to find a way to improve my skill sets," she said.
Related: University students offload critical thinking, other hard work to AI
Schools across the country have announced programs similar to the one at Miami Dade College: courses in artificial intelligence in business settings and minors in AI marketed to students who are not computer science majors. But higher education institutions are not inherently nimble - and the technology is evolving quickly.
Because generative AI is changing so rapidly, there's no one curriculum or credential schools are using, or can look to, as a guidepost. What these lessons look like and the rules about how students should use AI vary by institution, or even classroom to classroom.
"Institutions are really built to move slowly - there are committees, policies, there's accreditation. It's almost in their DNA to not move fast," said Josh Jones, CEO of QuantHub, a company that works with schools including the University of Alabama and Emory University to add artificial intelligence lessons. "The problem we have is that AI is changing industries so fast that the textbooks, the curriculum - by the time you get it approved, it's relevant, but it's outdated."
There are ethical implications for using generative AI as well - from students using the technology to cheat on assignments to the demand that data centers are putting on the nation's water supply. Some studies indicate college students who use AI on assignments are less engaged with their lessons and use it to offload critical thinking.
Higher education institutions across the country have issued nearly identical statements acknowledging the risks, but also the need, for students to learn how to use artificial intelligence to prepare for the working world.
The challenge for colleges will be getting that balance right, producing graduates who know how to use artificial intelligence but are not wholly reliant on it.
James Taylor, a philosophy professor at The College of New Jersey, changed his classroom setup about a year and a half ago to prevent students from using AI on his assignments. Now, when the class has to write an essay, they do it by hand while in the room. When students take a test, they do it with paper and pencil via blue books.
Related: What aspects of teaching should remain human?
Taylor doesn't have a problem with students using AI in other classrooms and believes students should learn how to use AI tools, to some degree. He doesn't want students using it to get around having to think critically, however, a skill they will need even if they use AI in their future jobs.
"What we're trying to do is teach students how to think, how to identify arguments, analyze arguments, put together their own arguments," Taylor said. "When they just use AI to do this, they don't gain any of the critical thinking skills that they need."
For Derrick Anderson, who teaches public affairs at Arizona State University and is senior vice president at the American Council on Education, it's simple: If AI is a tool students will use at jobs, they should learn how to use it in his classroom.
"Because I'm preparing them for the job market, they need to know how to use generative AI ethically, but efficiently and effectively," Anderson said.
Now, instead of having students write an essay at the end of one of his public affairs courses, Anderson has them produce a video with the help of ChatGPT. One student in Anderson's class created a video about new technology that mimics the human brain. In the video, the student narrates as an AI-generated image of a model brain spins on the screen. When he starts talking about the electrical output of supercomputers, the video cuts to wind turbines spinning atop AI-generated grassy hills.
Previously, one of Anderson's class assignments required students to write a memo; now, they have to write four different kinds of memos using ChatGPT and describe scenarios where they would be appropriate.
"It's a fundamentally different exercise that involves a much larger volume of content because content is so much easier to create," Anderson said.
The students in his classes have used their AI videos and projects in their portfolios when looking for jobs to show they have experience with these programs, even if they lack a specific degree or credential.
Related: AI might disrupt math and computer science classes - in a good way
Employers are looking for those kinds of demonstrable examples of AI skills from graduates, said Ken Finneran, vice president of human resources at the digital health care company eMed, since there is no industry-recognized credential for the AI skills needed in a certain profession. Instead, hundreds of varying credentials are offered by companies, including Google and IBM.
Every department at eMed, from marketing to human resources to finance, uses generative artificial intelligence tools in some way, said Finneran, and the company expects all prospective employees to have some foundational knowledge of AI.
The company's departments are about 20 to 30 percent more productive after using AI tools to complete tasks, Finneran said. And he believes doctors who use AI are better at diagnosing patients than either the doctor or an artificial intelligence program alone.
"Those who are hesitant or even blockers around AI will not be the leaders, even if they have a tradition of being an industry leader, within the next two years," Finneran said. "They will be overtaken by those who are effectively leveraging AI."
Vivas, the creative media studio owner, said some of the freelancers he works with have approached him with concerns about generative artificial intelligence: photography models worried about being replaced by AI generated images and contract marketers concerned it will make them irrelevant if people start using ChatGPT to spit out their own marketing plans.
Vivas said he doesn't plan to use AI to fully replace humans, and he doesn't believe other employers will either. But he does think workers who ignore the technology do so at their own peril.
"It's not that AI is going to replace them," he said, "but the person that is using AI is going to replace them."
Contact reporter Ariel Gilreath on Signal at arielgilreath.46 or at gilreath@hechingerreport.org.
This story about AI courses was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.
The post To employers, AI skills aren't just for tech majors anymore appeared first on The Hechinger Report.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
What Are the 5 Best Bargain Artificial Intelligence (AI) Stocks to Buy Right Now?
Looking for low PEG ratios can be one way to find stocks that are currently on sale. AMD, Broadcom, and Nvidia are all cheap chip stocks given their projected growth. Salesforce and Adobe are two SaaS companies riding the AI wave that have fallen into the bargain bin. 10 stocks we like better than Nvidia › In a fast-growing segment like artificial intelligence (AI), it's not always easy to spot bargains; however, they can be found. One of the best ways to find bargains in a hot sector is to look beyond stocks' price-to-earnings (P/E) ratios and instead look at their price/earnings-to-growth (PEG) ratios, as this metric takes into consideration their earnings growth. Stocks with PEGs under 1 are generally considered undervalued, and based on this metric, five of the best values in the AI space are Advanced Micro Devices (NASDAQ: AMD), Broadcom (NASDAQ: AVGO), Salesforce (NYSE: CRM), Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA), and Adobe (NASDAQ: ADBE). Let's look at why these bargain AI stocks could be great buys. With a forward PEG of only 0.2 based on its projected 2026 growth, AMD is one of the cheapest stocks in the AI space -- if it can live up to its growth expectations. The company has already been seeing solid growth, with its overall revenue climbing by 36% last quarter to $7.44 billion, while its data center segment revenue surged 57% to $3.7 billion. The growth is being led by the company's strong positioning within server central processing units (CPUs) and solid growth from its graphics processing units (GPUs). The former acts as the brain for computers, while the latter provides the processing power. While the market for CPUs is not nearly as robust as the one for GPUs in the data center space, it is still a nice, growing market, and AMD has been taking share. However, the company's biggest opportunity will come when the AI market shifts from training more toward inference, which is expected to eventually be the much larger market. Inference is less technically demanding than training AI models, and things such as latency, power consumption, and cost come much more into play. This should allow AMD to take some market share in the GPU space, which would fuel a lot of growth moving forward. Broadcom is another cheap chip stock with a big opportunity in front of it. The company is seeing solid growth, with revenue jumping 25% last quarter to $14.9 billion, led by a 70% surge in its networking revenue. However, it is its foray into custom AI chips that has the potential to really drive growth higher. The company has seen strong success with its first custom AI chip customer, Alphabet, which has led to it winning additional customers. It sees its three furthest-along custom AI chip customers being a $60 billion to $90 billion serviceable market opportunity in its fiscal year 2027 (ending October 2027). If it can capture much of this opportunity, then the stock has a lot of potential upside from here. Notably, that number does not include more recent custom chip customer wins, including Apple. With a PEG of around 0.4 based on fiscal 2026 earnings, Broadcom has some serious upside potential. The biggest risk for it, as well as AMD, would be a slowdown in AI infrastructure spending. Given their recurring revenue model, software-as-as-service (SaaS) stocks typically trade at premium valuations, but that is not currently the case with Salesforce. With a forward PEG of around 0.5, the stock is in the bargain bin. However, the company has strong data-center and AI opportunities ahead. It's been seeing strong momentum with its Data Cloud solution, which helps customers unify their data into a single source, while it is also looking to be an agentic AI leader with its Agentforce platform. Last quarter, its Data Cloud annual recurring revenue (ARR) soared 120% year over year to more than $1 billion, while its Agentforce platform reached ARR of $100 million after only being launched last fall. The company is looking to tightly integrate Data Cloud and Agentforce with its apps, such as Tableau and Slack, to help spark a new era of digital labor. Meanwhile, it recently introduced a new flexible Agentforce consumption-based pricing model more aligned with outcomes to increase customer satisfaction and drive adoption. While there is always a risk its strategy will not work, at its current valuation, there is not much downside if it doesn't and a lot of upside if it does. It's sometimes hard to believe investors can get the preeminent AI growth stock at a forward PEG of only 0.7 times. However, based on fiscal 2026 projections, that's Nvidia's current valuation. The company has grown its data center revenue ninefold over the past two years, and more growth is ahead. While competitors are trying to make inroads, Nvidia is still the dominant market share leader when it comes to AI chips. It had an incredible 92% market share in the GPU space in Q1. Nvidia's secret sauce remains its CUDA software platform, which it developed to help expand the use of its chips beyond their original purpose of speeding up graphics rendering in video games. It has since layered a collection of libraries and tools on top of CUDA that enhance the performance of its chips in AI tasks. Nvidia's newest chips remain in high demand, and the company is well positioned to continue to be one of the biggest beneficiaries of the current AI data center buildout. An AI infrastructure spending slowdown is a risk, but the stock is far from being priced for perfection, giving it solid upside potential from here. Adobe isn't a high-growth stock, but with a PEG of 0.8, it's fallen into the category of growth at a reasonable price (GARP). While AI isn't helping accelerate revenue growth, it has helped it settle in a nice, high-single-digit, low-double-digit range. The company is using AI to help drive results within its creative software solutions, as well as its products aimed more toward business professionals. At the heart of its strategy is its Firefly generative AI model. Using just natural language prompts, FireFly can help users generate images, video, audio, and vector content that they can further manipulate with Adobe's creative tools, such as Photoshop, all while ensuring intellectual property protection. Document Cloud and Express have also incorporated FireFly into their platform and can handle everything from summarizing documents in Document Cloud to text-to-video generation in Express. All in all, the stock is inexpensive, and it looks like AI should continue to help power Adobe's results moving forward. Before you buy stock in Nvidia, consider this: The Motley Fool Stock Advisor analyst team just identified what they believe are the for investors to buy now… and Nvidia wasn't one of them. The 10 stocks that made the cut could produce monster returns in the coming years. Consider when Netflix made this list on December 17, 2004... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $659,171!* Or when Nvidia made this list on April 15, 2005... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $891,722!* Now, it's worth noting Stock Advisor's total average return is 995% — a market-crushing outperformance compared to 172% for the S&P 500. Don't miss out on the latest top 10 list, available when you join . See the 10 stocks » *Stock Advisor returns as of June 9, 2025 Suzanne Frey, an executive at Alphabet, is a member of The Motley Fool's board of directors. Geoffrey Seiler has positions in Alphabet and Salesforce. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Adobe, Advanced Micro Devices, Alphabet, Apple, Nvidia, and Salesforce. The Motley Fool recommends Broadcom. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy. What Are the 5 Best Bargain Artificial Intelligence (AI) Stocks to Buy Right Now? was originally published by The Motley Fool Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
Prediction: Soaring Palantir Stock Will Continue to Defy Analysts' Expectations Through 2026
Palantir's revenue and profits are soaring, but its valuation is out of hand. The company's AI platform is a must-have for government and commercial clients. Wall Street is divided on the stock, but I think the future is clear. 10 stocks we like better than Palantir Technologies › Is there a more compelling -- or polarizing -- stock on U.S. indexes right now than Palantir Technologies (NASDAQ: PLTR)? On the one hand, the company is showing ridiculous growth, sending shares up 85% so far in 2025 and 440% over the past 12 months. But the company, which is evolving from a government contractor to a powerhouse that uses artificial intelligence to help both government and commercial clients make real-time decisions, has a stock valuation that would make even the most stout-hearted investor wince. And there's emerging concern that some of Palantir's newest deals with the U.S. government are walking (or blurring) a line separating government needs and personal privacy. Analysts are all over the map when forecasting Palantir's future, but most of those tracked by Yahoo! Finance rate the stock a hold, and the group has an average price target of $101 as I write this, while the stock trades at about $140 per share. But I think Palantir is going to continue to outperform -- and confound -- Wall Street at least through 2026. Long-term investors should buckle in for the ride. Palantir delivered its first-quarter 2025 earnings report in early May. Revenue grew 39% year over year, with U.S. commercial sales up 71% and U.S. government sales up 45%. That's along with a 39% increase in total customer count year over year, and an 8% quarter-to-quarter gain. The company is landing huge deals, too, including 139 deals in Q1 worth more than $1 million, 51 deals worth more than $5 million, and 31 deals worth more than $10 million. The stock's market capitalization, which was just $56.4 billion a year ago, is now $331 billion. While Palantir is best known for its military and intelligence use cases (the company first rose to public prominence in its role helping the government find and kill Osama bin Laden), it's got its fingers in plenty of other pies, including healthcare, factory modernization, and helping financial institutions make real-time, AI-powered decisions. Palantir recently announced partnerships with Italian paper manufacturer Fedrigoni, healthcare organization The Joint Commission, Elon Musk's xAI, and investment firm TWG Global, as well as six industrial firms. All of this shows Palantir's commercial business is just getting started. Any conversation about Palantir's valuation has to start with those gaudy price-to-earnings numbers. The forward P/E based on estimated earnings is 256, and the trailing P/E is an outrageous 600. Wall Street's consensus price target for PLTR is $101, with a high of $155. One analyst has a price target of $40. That reflects how wildly divided analysts are on what Palantir's true value is. But if you can't stop thinking about the P/E, keep this in mind: Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) had a P/E in 2013 of over 1,000 with a market cap of only $120 billion. It was primarily known as an e-commerce company as its Amazon Web Services was only 7 years old. But AWS has since helped Amazon revolutionize cloud computing, allowing companies to rent computing power instead of investing in expensive data centers. It created a new revenue stream for Amazon and forever changed the company's business model. Today, AWS provides billions in annual revenue and provides Amazon a key role in the future of technology. That's a major reason why Amazon's market cap exploded to reach more than $2 trillion today -- the market finally recognized its true value. So, sometimes great companies trade at incredible valuations before the world understands their real potential. And I think that's where we are with Palantir. As the world gets more complicated -- war in Ukraine and the Middle East, tensions between Washington and Beijing, and the massive changes happening in the U.S. government -- Palantir's government contracts are just going to grow. The demand for AI-driven intelligence tools is rising. Not everyone is comfortable with that. There are published reports that Palantir is expanding its role with the Pentagon, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Department of Health and Human Services. And it's also reportedly talking to the Internal Revenue Service and the Social Security Administration. The fear is that the government will be able to use Palantir's Foundry platform to create a massive government database that keeps track of data like individual bank account numbers, debt, citizenship or immigration status, and medical information. I'm not going to make a value judgment about Palantir, although it's important to acknowledge the elephant in the room. From an investment perspective, though, I'm taking notice about what these developments say about the power and reach of Palantir's software. Palantir helps its customers anticipate threats, track assets, manage resources, and make split-second decisions. The more unpredictable the world becomes, the more essential Palantir's technology becomes, and this will make it more appealing to investors. There's no easy call to make on Palantir stock. On the one hand, revenue and profits are growing, and the software is both unique and necessary. But on the other hand, Palantir's valuation is absurd and the privacy debate won't go away soon. It's no wonder that analysts are all over the place. Here's where I land: Palantir is a future-defining force in AI, doing amazing work not only with the military and the government but also in industries that people use every day. The company beat expectations in 2024 and it's killing it in 2025. I see that continuing throughout the rest of the year and into 2026, even if Wall Street's not on board. Palantir will prove its skeptics wrong. Before you buy stock in Palantir Technologies, consider this: The Motley Fool Stock Advisor analyst team just identified what they believe are the for investors to buy now… and Palantir Technologies wasn't one of them. The 10 stocks that made the cut could produce monster returns in the coming years. Consider when Netflix made this list on December 17, 2004... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $659,171!* Or when Nvidia made this list on April 15, 2005... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $891,722!* Now, it's worth noting Stock Advisor's total average return is 995% — a market-crushing outperformance compared to 172% for the S&P 500. Don't miss out on the latest top 10 list, available when you join . See the 10 stocks » *Stock Advisor returns as of June 9, 2025 Patrick Sanders has no positions in any of the stocks mentioned. John Mackey, former CEO of Whole Foods Market, an Amazon subsidiary, is a member of The Motley Fool's board of directors. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Amazon and Palantir Technologies. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy. Prediction: Soaring Palantir Stock Will Continue to Defy Analysts' Expectations Through 2026 was originally published by The Motley Fool Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
BNB Slips Below Key Support as Traders Brace for Maxwell Upgrade and Mideast Shockwaves
BNB has fallen to $635, weathering a choppy market as traders brace for the Maxwell hard fork and rising geopolitical risk in the Middle East. The token's resilience comes as daily transactions on the BNB Chain have surged from 8 million to 17.6 million since mid-May, according to DeFiLlama data. Scheduled for June 30, the Maxwell fork will reduce block times from 1.5 seconds to 0.75 seconds and bring in a series of improvements. It's expected to improve transaction throughput and user experience. Investors are also reacting to mounting global uncertainty. Crude prices have surged more than 10% over the past week as markets weigh the possibility of the United States entering the Israel-Iran conflict. A shutdown of Iranian oil exports or closure of the Strait of Hormuz, Reuters reports, could drive oil to $130 a barrel, analysts at Oxford Economics warned. That could potentially push U.S. inflation to 6% and derail hopes for rate cuts this year. In that environment, risk assets like BNB can see a sell-off as investors move to risk-off positioning. BNB is trading within a narrow range between $635 and $646, with volume confirming a solid support base at $638, as confirmed by a spike in volume. Repeated attempts to break through resistance near $644.5–$645 failed, suggesting sellers are defending that zone, according to CoinDesk Research's technical analysis model. A volume burst of 4,222.99 tokens earlier corresponded with a rapid drop to $638, reinforcing that area as a support level that has now been breached as volumes tapered off for the weekend Parts of this article were generated with the assistance from AI tools and reviewed by our editorial team to ensure accuracy and adherence to our standards. For more information, see CoinDesk's full AI Policy. Sign in to access your portfolio
