In a panel at the GENAI EXPO, technology lawyer and AI trainer Enrico Schaefer and three other speakers discuss whether AI adoption is currently an individual skill or an organizational priority. Speaker B advises workers to experiment with free AI tools, develop "power skills" (human soft skills) that will become premium as technical abilities become commoditized, and warns of upcoming contract clauses that will license AI representations of employee personas. Schaefer jokes about his AI avatar’s appearance, prompting Speaker C to note that the rise of AI‑generated personas will create a "gold rush" for IP and labor attorneys. Speaker D expands on the limits of generative AI, arguing that while AI can scrape and remix corporate content, true knowledge and empathy remain challenging, and ownership of AI‑generated outputs may be ambiguous. The discussion highlights practical career advice, the shifting value of human skills, and emerging legal, ethical, and IP considerations surrounding AI avatars and content creation.
Chapters
Can I ask a question quick on just to follow up on that? So, uh, Enrico Schaefer, Traverse AI YouTube channel, and I represent the end-user perspective. I'm a lawyer, technology lawyer, and I train other business professionals to use AI at work, which is still very new, very evolving. But it seems to me that right now AI is largely an individual endeavor that is an individual skill that's Some people are developing, right? Organizational AI seems to be behind the times. They're trying to figure out how to get their people up to speed. What kind of people are they? The right people? These types of things. So in this phase of I have a choice as a worker, as an employee, to either AI or not AI, like what recommendations do you have for that end user?
Yeah, so in order to sort of future-proof your career as an individual, I encourage people to learn, experiment as much as they can with AI and AI tools. There's lots of free tools out there that you can gain access to. There's resources like your— I have come across your YouTube channel, but there's resources like that, lots of newsletters out there that they can use. But also I encourage people to work on those, what I call power skills. So like I said earlier, the soft skills will turn into the power skills in the future. And so what makes us inherently human is how we interact with each other as humans. And because technical skills are becoming more and more commoditized, you can now use low-code, no-code solutions to create code, you can now, as a small business owner, I have graphic design needs, for example, but I'm not a graphic designer, but using AI, I can meet my graphic design needs. And so because we can acquire those technical skills much more easily now, we will start to place a premium on those human skills or those power skills. And so that's what I encourage people to do. The other thing to keep in mind from an individual perspective is Gartner predicts that by 2027, 70% of new employment contracts for new hires will contain licensing and fair usage clauses for AI representations of their personas. So like Oppo said, he's working on cloning himself. Well, we may soon have a future where your employer creates an AI avatar of you. And so if your AI avatar is back at the office doing a presentation for the team and you're over here working on your laptop, do you get paid twice? And what if your employer uses your avatar to train your replacement or train other people after you leave the company? Do you get paid for that, right? And what if your employer uses your avatar to say something that you would never, ever say? And so these are the types of questions that we as business leaders are going to need to take into account and consider the ethics of introducing AI transformation. But it's important for individuals, coming back to the individual point, to be aware of their rights as we go through this process.
We know my AI avatar is way better looking than I am.
I'm sorry?
Oh, I was gonna say my AI avatar is way better looking than I am.
So what I'm hearing then is that this is just gonna be a gold rush for IP attorneys and, and employee labor attorneys going forward in terms of licensing individual personas and things like that. So that's really, that's the Wild West. They have to because they're going to be largely
replaced by AI. I would love to make a comment on that because in AI, one thing is to read the book and process the book, and another thing is to clone the book and to put your name Okay, this representing the offbeat version. So today in your company, you have created multiple PowerPoints, multiple documentation. That information belongs to the company. I can scrap, I can consume that data, and I can add product, I can add my customer lifecycle information and I can generate questions. So I don't think it's gonna be like a gold mine for IP. I think if it's out there and I can consume it, I can tweak it and I can create new content and it will belong to me. But again, it is just the way I think. I am more into What GenAI cannot do today. Knowledge, I don't care. And I guess I have to say I don't care about knowledge because they are behind the knowledge. It has demonstrated that AI or GenAI can build empathy. So, oh, my empathy. Yeah. I can do empathy 24/7. I can align with you. You better read out your LinkedIn and your social media. I can scrap all that and then I can create a persona. I can then create a document to say, hey, talk to that guy like this. Then if I connect your documentation to the emails and to your past purchases, I can do amazing things with that. So it's a new world for me. I think for everyone, but I think it's fascinating and it's very, very Interesting, I'll have to say.
