The AI Skill Domains Reshaping Work
The conversation around AI has moved past "what if" to a more challenging question of "how." And while managers believe having a workforce trained in AI will be critical for their organization's success, very few workers are considered “fluent” in AI. Tool access alone has not yet translated into transformation and the result is a persistent disconnect: employers want AI-skilled talent and workers want the benefits, but both lack a clear roadmap for delivering measurable returns.
A Data-Driven Roadmap to Readiness
To solve this clarity problem, The Burning Glass Institute worked with the Skills-First Workforce Initiative to combine labor market research with real-world insights from talent leaders. Together, we’ve moved beyond the hype to identify where and how AI is reshaping work. This process involved:
Mapping GenAI Capabilities to Knowledge Worker Skills: By detailing over 700+ capabilities of leading genAI labs’ public products—ranging from data analysis to communication, content creation, or application development—we were able to map the key capabilities of genAI today to 450 of the most prevalent knowledge-worker skills in today's economy.
Clustering for Impact: We clustered the 450 skills based on similarity and market prevalence to identify the specific intersections where technology is most actively transforming human labor. We organized these skills into six AI Skill Domains.
Employer Validation: The Skills-First Workforce Initiative (SFWI), a cohort of leading employers convened by Walmart, pressure-tested and refined the data, ensuring the framework reflected the operational needs of global organizations, and constructed a robust definition of “AI Acumen”.
The Framework for Transformation
This partnership between BGI and the Skills-First Workforce Initiative resulted in a research-backed, employer-validated framework. It provides the structure necessary to move from tool access to true "AI Fluency"—a combination of AI Acumen, which establishes the foundational knowledge and ethical standards required to use AI responsibly, and the six AI Skill Domains, which identify the functional areas of work that are being reshaped by AI.
By defining exactly where AI is transforming work and what workers need to learn to leverage it, this framework allows companies to stop experimenting in isolation and start investing in a workforce that is truly AI-fluent.
Read the full report below to explore the framework. You can also check out Google’s new AI Professional Certificate, build around this framework, to gain hands-on experience building the AI skills employers are looking for.