Your AI Strategy is Only as Good as Your People Strategy

As AI moves from experimentation to enterprise impact, success depends on workforce readiness, not just technology. Market leaders have upskilled over 50% of their employees and are redesigning workflows around AI, while 60% of organizations still struggle to generate value from their investments. In this session, Robin Sutara and Melanie Botha explore how to build an AI-enabled workforce by aligning culture, people, process and enablement with your data strategy. You'll learn how to assess your data and AI maturity, close critical skills gaps at scale through structured learning programs, and integrate AI agents into teams in ways that elevate human talent. Drawing on customer proof points and the Databricks data and AI maturity framework, this session provides a practical roadmap for treating upskilling as a core investment—so every project becomes a data and AI project and every employee contributes to AI-driven outcomes.