AI upskilling for GBS professionals has quietly become one of the most consequential questions in our industry.
I was in Singapore a few weeks ago when Budget 2026 was announced. Tucked into the speech by Prime Minister Lawrence Wong was something that caught my attention: Singaporeans who enroll in selected AI training courses will receive six months of free access to premium AI tools. This is part of the country’s SkillsFuture program, a decade-old initiative that has already supported over 600,000 individuals in training in 2025 alone.
How Coordinated Is the Global Response to AI Skills Development?
This is aggressive, even by global standards. I have not come across anything quite as coordinated among Western economies. Germany offers some skills development support, and individual countries have patchwork programs, but nothing with the same breadth or intentionality. The reason, I suspect, has less to do with governments caring more about workers and more to do with economic models. Countries with more centralized market planning tend to see citizen retraining as a national investment. Countries like the US operate on the assumption that labor markets are flexible enough to self-correct, with retraining left to private enterprise or the individual.
Why Perception of AI Shapes Workforce Readiness
National narratives around AI shape workforce perceptions about job security in ways that directly affect how people engage with upskilling. There is an interesting pattern that has shown up in global workforce surveys. People in Asia tend to view AI as more of an opportunity than a threat. Their counterparts in Europe and North America are more likely to see it as a job risk. A US workforce survey found that over 40 percent of American workers expect AI to primarily eliminate jobs, while only 18 percent see it creating new opportunities in other fields. The contrast with the Middle East and Asia, where PwC research found around 80 percent of employees saying AI has improved their productivity, is striking.
2024 Global AI Vibrancy Ranking by HAI, Standford University
Opportunity or Threat: You Are Asking the Wrong Question
Here is the thing. The framing of opportunity versus threat is not the right debate to be having. Most genuinely disruptive technologies, including AI, will be both. So the question is not whether this glass is half full or half empty. The more important question is who owns the glass. Is it the country? The company? Or you, individually?
At the end of the day, all skill-building is personal. That means there are really two questions each of us should be asking right now. First: in my specific situation, is AI more likely to be an opportunity or a threat? And second: what is my personal game plan to build AI capability, regardless of whether the support comes from a government budget, free online education, or my company’s training program?
AI Upskilling for GBS Professionals Is Especially Urgent
These questions are more urgent for those of us in the GBS world than for almost any other professional community. GBS is fundamentally a people and knowledge business. The work we do, from process transformation to business partnering and end-to-end value creation, sits in exactly the category most exposed to AI impact. The APEX GBS Standards Version 2 dedicates an entire section to AI integration precisely because the profession can no longer afford to treat it as a peripheral concern.
At Inixia, we designed our Professional GBS Certification and the GBS Expert Series on Agentic AI to address this capability gap directly. These are not theoretical frameworks. They are practitioner-built tools for leaders who need to understand what AI means for their operating model, their teams, and their own role, and who want to act on that understanding now.
The Answer Starts With You
So back to the question in the title. Who is going to upskill you on AI? The most honest answer, regardless of country, company, or budget cycle, is that you probably need to drive it yourself. The question is just whether you are waiting for someone to hand you the glass, or you have already started drinking.
If you want to understand how AI fits into a mature GBS operating model, our Inixia Insights library is a good place to start. And if you are ready to build structured capability, we are ready to help.