EY's talent leader has 400,000 employees to reskill: Here's how he's moving from vision to execution

Turning CEO strategy into reality is the challenge facing most HR leaders right now.

Research from EY-Parthenon shows nearly all CEOs (99%) expect AI to change their workforce strategy over the next three years.

The work in front of people leaders is to drive AI adoption across the organization, while also redesigning how work is done.

Thankfully, the two factors interlink and inform each other.

Dan Black, EY’s Global Leader for Talent Strategy and Organizational Effectiveness, is at the forefront of this change for the consulting giant’s 400,000 global employees.

He tells UNLEASH that the results of the 2026 CEO Outlook Survey show a trend at odds with media headlines that blame AI for job losses and fewer hiring opportunities.

“That's a factor of CEOs understanding that when it comes to investment in AI, it needs to be alongside an investment in the human workforce for upskilling, reskilling, etc.,” he says.

The question of whether AI will reduce hiring is one he is most often asked as a Talent leader.

In response, Black highlights that 46% of CEOs believed AI would lead to reduced hiring in 2024. That figure is down to 20% in the 2026 iteration of EY’s research.

Black says that the productivity and cost-saving gains of AI are “still very much part of the conversation,” but smarter organizations are not focused on these outcomes in isolation.

“If you're standing still in terms of status quo and what you're offering to the market, then maybe AI is doing more replacing,” he says.

“But if you're planning to grow, that needs to include the human workforce.”

How EY is approaching reskilling across 400,000 employees

EY’s survey demonstrates that business leaders are focused on enabling their workforces to adapt to the AI-driven world of work.

The research finds 44% of CEOs are redesigning roles to combine human and AI capabilities, while 42% are undertaking large-scale upskilling and reskilling of employees.

Black says that EY remains committed to employee development structures such as learning experiences, mentoring, and coaching, but is also “in the process of changing decades-old ways of doing things”.

The starting point was “getting more granular” on what skills the organization’s workforce has and what it needs to develop as certain tasks are allocated to AI.

He acknowledges that given the scale and complexity of EY as an organization that this “takes some doing” but that technology is helping to shed new light on its inventory of untapped potential.

“We're uncovering that what's on a resume, whether that's education or work experience, does not always give the purview you need into what people are capable of doing, what their actual skills are.”

The next piece is redesigning roles by mapping them directly to the skills needed in the context of what human employees still own as AI takes over task-level work.

This is broken down into three categories: technical, business, and leadership.

“The difference of looking at it at that granular level is now we can use those skills for decisions on talent,” he says.

Talent acquisition is one area Black highlights that benefits from this process: moving away from credential-heavy listings focused on qualifications and experience.

“If you look at our job descriptions today at EY versus what they were even five years ago, there's much more granularity on the specific skills that we are looking to assess for a particular role.”

Another is matching the right skills internally to specific tasks, projects or engagements “even if someone didn't have a specific rank level or litany of experiences”.

“That is a big part of what we're in the middle of rolling out in real time, better engagement management using more granular skill taxonomy, as opposed to just looking at rank and grade,” Black explains.

Culture also requires investment to get the most out of skills initiatives

Implementing the skills-based strategies is a significant challenge for Talent leaders, but there are other, interlinked considerations that need to be addressed.

As most HR leaders will probably already be familiar with, tools and processes won’t succeed if company culture is actively working against them.

In response to this challenge, EY implemented a new EVP two years ago to “encourage the entire ecosystem to think more and be more agile,” Black explains.

“Culture doesn't just happen on its own - you have to foster the right behaviors.”“Culture doesn't just happen on its own - you have to foster the right behaviors.”

A new internal talent mobility initiative launched in April offers “access to all of our people to all of our opening roles, and also gives an easier pathway for them to at least explore what other options are.”

Black says that may sound simple, but it acts as a “cultural fulcrum” that encourages both employees and managers to think differently about how they apply skills and gain experience across the organization.

Meanwhile, EY has also introduced ‘Thrive Time’ - dedicated charge codes that employees can use for specific upskilling opportunities to improve agility and increase their access to those opportunities in the internal mobility program.

People leaders will recognize the inherent value of these changes as AI changes demands on and opportunities for the workforce.

However, CEOs and other business leaders that are asking questions on the efficacy of investing in the workforce and their skills, as well as AI, may need harder evidence.

Black says there are three key metrics HR and talent leaders should focus on to demonstrate business results:

• Skills profile completion and learning uptake: if employees are not engaging with the opportunities then the system isn’t working. Without this data, HR leaders are talking about skills, not acting.
• Internal versus external sourcing ratio: a clear indicator of reskilling progress. Spend on external recruitment goes down as internal talent pipelines are strengthened and expanded.
• Employee listening data: the true acid test that culture is working in lockstep with strategy and practice. Messaging and initiatives are filtering down to employees, as are the results of listening data action.

“The good news is that we can use AI to help hypothesize and synthesize that data in ways that we could never do in the past,” Black adds.

Ultimately, the decision in front of CEOs and people leaders alike is not whether AI is a headcount issue – it's what their human workforce can achieve when the organization is fully aware of what they are capable of.