59% of Employees Will Need Reskilling by 2030, WEF Warns

By Olivia Hart

Fifty-nine percent of employees will need to reskill by 2030 as AI reshapes the workplace, according to the World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report. Eric Francia, co-founder and CEO of Stockholm-based Uniplay, builds his entire management philosophy around that number. His argument: the humans directing AI systems matter as much as the systems themselves.

Francia, whose agent-driven, game-based learning platform Uniplay is his sixth company, laid out his case in a guest essay for Crunchbase News. He has built, exited and scaled digital companies across 70 countries. His core claim is blunt: "What once took a large team months to do can now be done by a handful of people in a few days."

That compression cuts both ways. Leaner teams move faster, but every individual hire carries more weight. Francia writes that choosing the right people to direct AI systems "will become make or break for a company." He offers no metric for how a founder measures that judgment — a gap worth noting before treating curiosity as a hiring silver bullet.

What does 'AI by design' actually mean?

For Francia, the phrase covers two things, not one. "It's also about creating autonomous humans," he writes. "You need to trust the human in the loop as much as you do the technology."

His reasoning: a founder cannot be in every room. "Surrounding yourself with people you trust to make decisions when you're not in the room is critical to success."

He pairs this with a warning about planning. A job description can differ completely from the one advertised by the time a candidate is found. A six-month roadmap is outdated by the time it is finished. The takeaway in plain words: in AI-era companies, fixed plans and fixed skill sets both expire quickly.

Why hire for curiosity over credentials?

Francia reads CVs differently from most founders. "It's not just experience or academic credentials that draw me in," he writes. "I look for what people have built on the side. What have they made on their own initiative?"

His logic follows directly from the WEF reskilling figure. If most of the workforce must relearn its tools within five years, hiring for today's skills is a depreciating asset. "The people worth investing in are those who are able to learn what comes next," he writes.

There is a cultural condition attached. "If your team is worried about saying the wrong thing, they won't end up saying the right thing either." The takeaway: curiosity only pays off where questioning carries no penalty.

How much autonomy should employees get?

More than most managers are comfortable granting, in Francia's telling. Employees with autonomy "operate faster" and "make better decisions because company vision is not abstract to people who are given real responsibility to drive it."

He also makes an operational argument: people closest to the product spot problems first. "Make sure your team has the autonomy to try to fix them before they take hold," he writes.

The essay does not address where autonomy ends — budget limits, oversight, or what happens when an autonomous employee gets it wrong. Readers weighing this advice should note the omission.

Is boredom a balance-sheet risk?

Francia frames disengagement as a financial exposure, not a soft HR issue. "As companies become smaller, employee retention is more important than ever," he writes. "Losing your best people is costlier when you have fewer of them to begin with."

The mechanism is mundane and concrete: "A bored employee is more likely to be swayed by a flattering LinkedIn recruiter." Boredom, he adds, makes talented people "a little bit slower, and a lot less likely to try the difficult thing."

His prescription: invest in development, keep people learning, and grant responsibility from day one.

The essay closes where it opens — with the junior employee who questions how things have always been done. "Dare to be a beginner, and teach your team to do the same," Francia writes. "That junior employee questioning how you've always done things could be the most valuable person in the room."

For founders staffing lean AI-era teams, the practical test is whether they can verify curiosity in a hiring process — Francia's essay tells them to look for it, but not how to measure it.