AI Training And Certifications Midmarket IT Leaders Need In 2026: Ready.Set.Midmarket! Podcast
By 2030, CIOs expect AI will be involved in virtually every IT task, even when humans remain firmly in the loop.
That is according to a recent survey conducted by research firm Gartner. The survey of over 700 CIOs suggests it is imperative that midmarket IT leaders prepare themselves, their staff, and end-users for AI readiness now as the frenetic pace of AI adoption shows no signs of abating.
In the latest episode of MES Computing’s podcast for midmarket IT leaders, Ready.Set.Midmarket! guests Raj Dubey, CTO of LT – one of the largest marketing agencies in the Southwest – and Jay Bavisi, president, EC Council – a longstanding tech certification body – provided their expertise and insight on the reasons why IT leaders must level up their AI skills.
Preparing For Probabilistic Vs. Traditional Deterministic Tech
AI, Bavisi suggested, is unlike any other wide-sweeping tech trend the world has seen before.
“This is a brand-new technology that is being implemented. If we look at the elements of technology, if we look at IT traditionally, we know that IT was always deterministic. You have a solution, you have a clear outcome. You put in certain inputs, you get certain outcomes,” he said.
AI, however, is “probabilistic.”
“Every time you put something in an AI, the LLM model is going to spit out something slightly differently,” Bavisi said. “[With AI] we're dealing in a dynamic environment ... you think of the dynamism, the workforce challenge that we have is humongous because every organization, especially in the midmarket, which is where your audience really lies, is using AI.”
Just managing “shadow AI” within an organization requires a good grasp of AI fundamentals, Bavisi said.
An AI Skills And Talent Gap
Companies “are still struggling,” Dubey said about organizations’ AI goals. “There’s definitely a skills gap and a talent gap,” he added.
Dubey said AI training is needed among IT leadership not only to corral in shadow AI, but to create policies and put guardrails in place.
“We initially thought that prompt engineering will become like, ‘my God, it will be the most amazing thing on the planet ... but .... it’s about guarding those inputs. How do you normalize it? How do you define those boundaries?” he said.
While providing staff with the AI licenses and tools they wanted, Dubey said the next order of business was creating an AI council.
Dubey said that the AI council is a way to bring education and awareness about the organization’s AI goals, from executive leadership on down.
“We have two role types that are part of that council. Governance comes from all the way from the top. Our CEO is personally involved in that AI council so that they understand the implications and impact. I have data scientists that are part of that council. We have AI developers that are part of the council,” Dubey said.
AI skills training is key in implementing successful AI projects.
“We are going to need to really have the hunger to actually train our workforce right from the start and not a patch job,” Bavisi said. “Not, ‘okay, we want to implement a system today, so let's train them on the systems, right? We’ve really got to have workforce development embedded inside. We’ve got to have a culture of security more than the culture of driving profits. We got to think about governance, we got to think about risk, and this starts from the top.”
While EC Council is most noted for its ethical hacker certification program, the company has pivoted to cybersecurity certification and is announcing an soon-upcoming AI skills program.
When it comes to AI, “Hopefully we are going to be far more proactive in being trained,” Bavisi said.
The full episode can be watched on YouTube and heard on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
Previous RSM! episodes are here.