Vidya Krishnan, Chief Learning Officer at Ericsson, speaks with Merav Yuravlivker, Chief Learning Officer at Data Society, in a video interview about her professional trajectory and Ericsson’s AI upskilling strategy.

With nearly 95,000 employees spread across 180 countries, Krishnan’s role at Ericsson is a mission in global learning and development.

“We love to say that our sacred mission is to shift the skill sets, the mindsets, and the toolsets of our people to get them to change themselves,” says Krishnan. This sense of purpose is deeply personal for her. Speaking of her career evolution, she describes it as a journey through four distinct careers.

Beginning as a camp counselor, the role gave her the “love and reverence” for learning. Next, she trained as an electrical engineer and spent nearly two decades in the field, driven by a fascination with technology.

“I was and remain fascinated by the power of technology and especially the power to connect people,” says Krishnan. In her next pivot, she transitioned into customer technology training, which enabled her to explore the relationship between education, enablement, and performance.

“It was so evident that education enablement, performance, all of this is based on how people build skills and put their skills to work, and I wanted to be part of that,” says Krishnan.

She speaks of Ericsson not just as a workplace but as a 145-year-old technological force that continues to evolve and lead. “We do not want to act our age, but we’re an impressive powerhouse of technology. We build the networks that make everything work, so we create connections,” Krishnan adds.

She highlights the company’s pivotal role in powering the world’s communication infrastructure:

• Ericsson provides the majority of the world’s 5G network infrastructure.
• The organization delivers hardware, software, services, and, increasingly, enterprise solutions for private 5G networks.
• These networks are essential for mission-critical business applications, forming the foundation for digital transformation globally.

Ericsson’s AI upskilling journey: Strategy-driven, systematic, and scalable

Moving forward, Krishnan reflects on how AI has reshaped the company’s learning and development agenda – not as a sudden shift, but as a long-term, deliberate transformation. For her, the parallel between human learning and AI is striking.

“The first thing to recognize is that what makes AI so powerful is the very same thing that makes people powerful. The relentless ability to learn. Whether it’s an algorithm or a human.”

Delving further, Krishnan emphasizes that Ericsson’s journey with AI is far from recent. The company, a technology pioneer, has been engaging with AI well before it became a mainstream topic. However, the focused and large-scale upskilling of its workforce in AI truly began almost seven years ago.

Ericsson’s AI upskilling strategy, according to Krishnan, was anchored in two foundational, yet counterintuitive, realizations:

1. Skills must be strategy-driven

“Strategy without the skills and capabilities in the workforce is a daydream. And a workforce that has skills and capabilities that are not unified by a strategy – that can be a nightmare,” says Krishnan.

At Ericsson, identifying which skills mattered, AI for instance, was not random. It stemmed directly from the business strategy. She points out that upskilling should be as systematic and ongoing as the strategy itself.

2. Focus on one skill to move the needle

Instead of spreading efforts thin across multiple skills, Ericsson chose to zero in on one: AI. “We think we can get more out of shifting the entire company in this one skill than we can with telling everybody to learn a bunch of skills,” says Krishnan.

This deliberate focus began with one business unit, Managed Services, where the appetite for change was already strong. “When you’re in a services business, the people are the product, and that means that L&D is like R&D.”

Proficiency over consumption

Rather than pushing prescriptive learning content, Ericsson emphasized real-world proficiency, notes Krishnan. The company implemented a four-level proficiency model for AI skills, ranging from basic literacy to advanced application. “Attaining a level was a matter of qualification rather than completion,” she adds.

Key features of this approach included

• Project-based assessments: Higher proficiency levels required assessments that mimicked real work scenarios.
• Learning through failure: “We said, ‘You can fail your way to success.’” In essence, the focus is on learning through failure, irrespective of how long it takes to qualify.
• Flexible Pathways: Employees could learn through content, peer collaboration, or self-driven experience.

Those who qualified have been awarded digital credentials, which serve dual purposes:

1. Internal inventory: A searchable database of AI proficiency across the company.
2. External recognition: As the awardees increasingly posted their achievements on LinkedIn, customers began taking notice.

Krishnan shares that the initial pilot began with 300 AI subject matter experts and quickly scaled. It went from 300 to 3,000 in 18 months, 15,000 within a year, and today, nearly 50% of Ericsson’s 95,000 employees have AI skills.

“I’m very proud to say in our company of 95,000 people, almost one out of two has some level of AI skill. And we’re going after the other one out of the two,” Krishnan affirms.

Business impact and cultural shift

Wrapping up, Krishnan notes that the success was not just internal. The upskilling effort led to tangible business outcomes that included improved deal wins, on-time and high-quality delivery, greater value creation for customers, and top performers attributing success to skill enablement.

What began as a targeted initiative quickly created momentum across the organization, says Krishnan. “I call this weaponizing FOMO. All the other business units saw the success of that one and decided, ‘Okay, let’s try to scale this for the company,’” she concludes.

CDO Magazine appreciates Vidya Krishnan for sharing her insights with our global community.