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If Nike hired Michael Jordan to work at headquarters, would you expect the marketing team to start sinking three-pointers? Of course not. Hes extraordinary, but skill doesnt spread by proximity. Here’s a better question: What do Nike employees need to know about basketball? The rules. Game duration. Equipment specs. Enough to design better shoes, write sharper campaigns, and forecast demand accurately. They dont need to play in the NBA. And Nike doesnt need to hire NBA players to improve its business. The same is true for AI. Most companies dont need extreme AI talent to unlock real efficiency gains. They need people across the organization to understand how AI applies to their work. Until leaders get specific about which AI skills matter, where they live, and how they show up in day-to-day work, no amount of hiring AI experts will make an organization truly AI-enabled. THREE TYPES OF AI SKILLS AI skills arent a single capability. In practice, its three categories, each with its own learning curves, and business outcomes. 1. AI literacy: Everyones baseline 2. AI integration: Technical professionals everyday craft 3. AI creation: Specialists deep work 1. AI literacy is everyones job I like to think of this as teaching the entire company how to drive with GPS. Not everyone needs to build the map. But everyone should know when the directions are reliable, when the route is risky, and when the system is confidently wrong. First is AI literacy. Employees need to understand what AI can do, what it cant, and what it will do when it doesnt know the answer. Literacy prevents common failures: over-trusting outputs, under-using tools, and feeding poor context. Second is AI tool fluency, which is role-specific. A marketer generating content, a recruiter screening candidates, and a support lead drafting responses all need different AI tools. One reason I like IKEAs approach is that theyre treating AI literacy as every employee’s responsibility, and the companys responsibility to enable it. They equipped thousands of coworkers with Microsofts generative AI tools and gave them time to learn. What did this look like in practice? Designers generate product visualizations, store managers create training presentations, and supply chain analysts draft forecasting reports. Everyone, not just one department. 2. AI integration is a core skill for technical teams If AI literacy is drive with GPS, AI integration is install the GPS into the car. This is where engineering teams earn their keep. Integration skills include prompt design, system evaluation, and knowing when AI belongs in the flow. Here is what this looks like when done as a system. Salesforce created an internal demo series called Thoughtluck Thursdays, where engineers show short, practical demos of how they integrated AI into their processes and then share patterns other teams can reuse. Salesforces approach works because it creates repeatable templates and guardrails other engineers can ship. 3. AI creation is a specialty, not a company-wide requirement AI creation is the ability to develop, train, and refine models. It requires deep expertise in data collection and preparation, model training, evaluation, and specialized techniques. It is also the smallest cohort of most organizations. If you are not building models as a core part of your product strategy, you do not need a large AI creation team. You need a small number of specialists, and the rest of the organization needs to become competent in usage and integration. EXTERNAL HIRING HAS ITS PLACE Let me be clear: External hiring isnt wrong. Its necessary when you need skills you genuinely dont have, especially in AI creation. But hiring people with “AI skills” on their résumés cannot be your primary path to AI literacy and integration. First, there is no established market for AI skills. The capabilities are too new, the demand is everywhere, and the talent pool is impossibly thin. Every company is chasing the same small group of people, and most of those people are already employed or starting their own companies. Second, it is harder to teach someone the ins and outs of your business than to teach them how to incorporate AI into their daily work. The biggest returns come from reskilling the people who already understand your business, your culture, and your systems. This is where hiring and training stop being separate motions and start becoming one system. HR OWNS THIS Dont get me wrong, IT teams are essential. They evaluate vendors, manage security, and integrate systems. But selecting the right tools doesnt determine whether AI changes how work gets done by the people doing the work. Building the right skills does. That’s why HR needs a seat at the table from day one to ask the right questions: Who gets trained first? How will we train them? Which roles evolve? How will performance be measured? Are there larger talent mobility needs? Heres where to start: 1. Pick one team. Choose a group that’s already eager to experiment, has clearly defined processes already, and can measure impact. 2. Give them three months and a small budget. Let them explore AI tools relevant to their work. Provide training. Remove barriers. Measure what breaks and what works. 3. Share the results company-wide. The wins, the failures, the unexpected friction points. Make it real and specific. Thats your AI strategy. Not a nine-figure hire or a top-down mandate or a hope that capability spreads. Build the skills where work happens, scale what works, and repeat. Tigran Sloyan is the CEO and cofounder of CodeSignal.
Category:
E-Commerce
President Donald Trump’s administration has introduced a new, inverted food pyramid with fewer food groups. The new three-section food pyramid is part of the administration’s new nutrition policy announced Wednesday, which encourages Americans to eat whole or minimally processed foods, which it calls real food, and has been a longtime interest of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Kennedy’s policy interests also shine through on the initiative’s new website, realfood.gov, which features copy that reads like a MAHA manifesto. The National Design Studio gave the website a minimalist design that takes cues from consumer companies like Chobani and Sweetgreen, with clean, sans serif typefaces and playful illustrations. The new pyramid The original pyramid, released by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) in 1992, featured six sections. The new version is flipped and has three: protein, dairy, and healthy fats; vegetables and fruits; and whole grains. Sweets have been removed. [Image: USDA] “It’s upside down, a lot of people would say,” Kennedy said at a White House press conference. “But it was actually upside down before, and we just righted it.” The new pyramid graphic makes do with fewer groups by combining categories from the original food pyramid. Whole grains, once included in the base of the original pyramid, now make up the smallest portion of the new version, while old categoriesfruits and vegetables, and meat and dairyare combined. [Image: USDA] The graphic is colorful, with eye-catching, painterly illustrations of example foods that might appear in a 1970s health food magazine. But the infographic is less successful as a piece of communication design. It’s not clear how literally the placement of foods within the graphic is meant to be. And although supporting documents about the new pyramid offer specific guidelines, like suggesting that saturated fat consumption should not exceed 10% of total daily calories, the new pyramid does not communicate specifics itself. Users can hover over each section of the pyramid for additional information, but it doesn’t provide much. The pyramid doesn’t indicate how many servings of dairy or healthy fats you should have. And to determine your protein target, realfood.gov asks Americans to take on the additional step of first calculating their weight in kilograms. (Quite frankly, a lot of us don’t know what that is.) The federal government’s new guidance, which gets updated every five years, also removes specific recommendations about daily alcohol consumption and only suggests to drink less. It also calls for more protein and full-fat dairy. Government designers have worked to improve upon the food pyramid before. In 2005, an updated graphic made the food segments slice upwards instead of dividing the shape horizontally. In 2011, it ditched the pyramid altogether for MyPlate, a skeuomorphic representation of dietary guidelines that used a circular graphic to represent portions as they’d appear on a plate. The new 2026 pyramid represents the Trump administration’s “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) priorities under Kennedy’s Health Department and comes two days after the agency cut its number of recommended vaccines for children, worrying medical groups. The new recommendations are not meant to be a strict diet, according to its website, but “a flexible framework meant to guide better choices.” It’s minimalist, for sure, but whether Americans find it a useful guide to healthy living remains to be seen.
Category:
E-Commerce
GameStop is providing details on a new compensation package for CEO Ryan Cohen that is dependent on him meeting certain significant performance targets. The video game retailer said in a regulatory filing on Wednesday that Cohen would have to grow its market capitalization to $100 billion and it would need to hit $10 billion in cumulative performance EBITDA or earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization for his award to fully vest. GameStop said Cohen won’t receive any guaranteed pay, which it defines as no salary, no cash bonuses, and no stock that simply vests over time. His compensation is entirely at-risk, meaning he will only be paid if the company achieves significant market and operational goals, GameStop said in the filing. This structure ensures that Mr. Cohens incentives are directly aligned with creating long-term value for GameStops stockholders. The structure is similar to a pay package that Tesla shareholders approved for CEO Elon Musk, in which Musk would receive Tesla stock worth $1 trillion if he hits certain performance targets over the next decade. Cohen’s compensation package with GameStop includes stock options to buy more than 171.5 million common shares for $20.66 each. Shareholders must approve the new pay package at a special meeting in March or April. Shares of GameStop rose 4% to $21.49 in midday trading, giving the company a market cap of roughly $9.26 billion. The company’s shares are down substantially from May 2024 when influential investor Keith Gill, popularly known as Roaring Kitty,” appeared online for the first time in three years to declare his support for GameStop. Gill helped ignite a meme stock craze in early 2021, when GameStops stock price soared above $120. Michelle Chapman, AP business writer
Category:
E-Commerce
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