Head of N.J. AI Hub: Reskilling must be treated as R&D

Liat Krawczyk, the executive director of the New Jersey AI Hub, didn’t waste time before making her central point: New Jersey cannot meet the moment of artificial intelligence without fundamentally rebuilding the way it trains and retrains its people.

“There has to be a complete recall of how we think about lifelong learning,” she said.

Here’s the problem: Even with AI, it’s not going to be easy. And even with AI, there is no clear roadmap on how to do this.

Speaking on a panel Friday before an overflow crowd of business leaders at the New Jersey Business & Industry Association’s Public Policy Forum, Krawczyck said that workforce development cannot remain a one‑and‑done educational milestone that is reached early and never revisited.

AI training must be viewed like research and development: Experimental, continuous and supported by real investment, she said. She said the state should consider tax credits for lifelong learning and invest in systems that give everyone the means to train their own workforce.

Krawczyk argued that workforce redevelopment is not merely one topic around AI, but potentially the defining economic question of this transformational time.

“I think workforce is the most important question, period,” she said, noting that if skill-building lags behind innovation, the result isn’t simply slower growth but an economic bubble.

One with winners and losers.

Krawczyk told the crowd that she compared the introduction of AI in the workplace to the introduction of fiber‑optic cables, just a generation before. Many were laid before the market knew how to fully capitalize on them, leaving companies overbuilt and underprepared.

She said the same pattern could repeat if New Jersey builds AI capacity faster than its people can adopt it.

Krawczyk said the N.J. AI Hub, a public-private partnership that has brought together the state, Princeton University, Microsoft and Coreweave, is working on three fundamental problems around preparing the workforce for the AI era:

Industry skills gap: Skills and use cases remain undefined, making it difficult for educators or workforce programs to train toward a moving — and often ill‑defined — target. Without a common language or consensus, no training system can work at scale, she said.

To address that gap, the AI Hub is conducting an employer survey to collect real‑time needs across sectors. But she emphasized that this cannot be a one‑off — the state needs a “more iterative cycle” to match training programs with the shifting demands of industry, she said.

Academic adoption: Every educational institution in New Jersey is struggling with how to adapt to AI, Krawczyk said. She described five recurring pain points: how to upskill faculty; how to integrate AI into operations; how to design technical and AI‑for‑all curricula; and how to rethink pedagogy itself in an era when personalization, accessibility and automation are redefining what education can look like.

To help institutions move forward together rather than in silos, the AI Hub has launched an AI Faculty Future Studio — a collaboration among a dozen universities, half research institutions and half teaching institutions, aimed at co‑creating curricula and exploring governance models for AI use in education. She praised faculty leaders across the state for engaging deeply in this work.

Reskilling: It’s the question of the moment, Krawczyk said, for one simple reason: Reskilling programs do not work at scale.

She called finding a solution for this the thing that keeps her up at night.

“How are we going to rescale and upskill every single person in the state?” she asked.

Solving all of these problems will still leave one societal question unanswered: How is the state going to do this equitably?

Krawczyk stressed that reskilling cannot be reserved for the privileged or the already skilled.

That’s why the AI Hub, working with the Office of the Secretary of Higher Education, the Department of Labor and the state’s community college network, has launched New Jersey’s first AI and machine learning apprenticeship program, aimed at placing workers across industries — and helping employers expand their AI capacity, she said.

Part of the mission of the AI Hub is ensuring certain communities do not fall behind, she said. It can be those from underserved areas, but it also could be those operating small businesses and nonprofits, both of which may not have the capital to invest in reskilling or the bandwidth to make it happen.

Krawczyk referenced another transformational time in history to make her point: The Industrial Revolution.

Skilled weavers, once a coveted skill, were replaced by machines, a tough economic downfall for those workers.

However, those who learned to operate the new machinery experienced a huge amount of economic mobility, she said.

The question now, she said, is how to “leapfrog” communities into the opportunities created by AI — not leave them exposed to its disruptions.

“The more we can make sure that we are thinking very carefully about leveling everybody up so that we don’t create even greater inequality,” she said, “This is the root of why it’s so important.”

And why everyone needs to understand reskilling is R&D.

“Talent is at risk when it’s not ready for the times,” she said.