AI skills aren’t the only urgently needed skills to ready the workforce for the AI transformation. Skilling across workplace technology—not just AI—will be critical to successful AI-enablement projects, new research from Coursera and AWS finds.

The survey of technology leaders across top global firms finds that 88% agree planned AI investments will not succeed without increasing investments in skills development.

“Despite all this technological transformation and automation and speed that you know these leaders…still believe that humans are irreplaceable,” said Coursera’s CPO Marcelo Modica.

But the findings are a bit more complex. While AI upskilling is obviously important to success, technology leaders say cloud, data, and cybersecurity upskilling are also essentially needed, especially in the next three years, or AI initiatives spearheaded by organizations may underdeliver or even fail, according to the report.

For more on the skills employees need to meet AI transformation, keep reading here.—AD

HCM and enterprise software giant SAP plans to acquire the hiring platform SmartRecruiters.

Execs told reporters on a media call that the move would bolster SAP’s all-in-one suite with additional capabilities. The company announced the acquisition on August 1.

“Bringing in talent isn’t just an HR priority, it’s a business priority,” SAP SuccessFactors Chief Product Officer Dan Beck said on the call. “SmartRecruiters has a robust portfolio with advanced capabilities [that] allows us to move more quickly to serve our customers.”

He pointed to SmartRecruiters’s AI expertise in candidate sourcing and screening, its rich sources of recruiting data that can help SAP further people intelligence for strategic workforce planning, and its robust end-to-end workflows that can help SAP deliver a better candidate experience, as well as a better experience for talent pros.

For more on what this acquisition means for recruiters and hiring managers, keep reading here.—AD

After convincing some 9,000 employees in the IRS’s taxpayer service division to resign this year, the federal government has realized that, um, maybe that wasn’t the best idea.

The IRS recently posted job openings for around 4,500 IRS contact (aka customer service) representatives, according to the Federal News Network (FNN). Those are the employees in the agency’s Taxpayer Service division who answer phone calls, reply to mail, and work with taxpayers who visit its in-person service centers.

The agency had one of the smoothest “filing seasons in recent memory” this year, National Taxpayer Advocate Erin M. Collins wrote in her midyear report to Congress. It processed upward of 98% of individual tax returns and improved the Level of Service on its phone lines from 63% in 2024 to 87%. Last year’s filing season was also successful, thanks in part to Biden-era IRA funding that allowed the IRS to hire around 2,000 customer service representatives (CSRs) in 2023. In 2024, it answered 9 million more phone calls than in 2022, and cut wait times in half.

But the IRS stands to lose around 26% of its workforce once this year’s reductions in force are in full effect. More than 9,000 of the departing employees are from the Taxpayer Services division, which will shrink by around 22%.

For more on the hiring whiplash at the IRS, keep reading on CFO Brew.—CV